The latest patch notes have appeared for the Patch 6.1 PTR. Do note that these don't necessarily line up with datamining. We have new info on buffs and nerfs for Feral, Windwalker, and more! Check out the classes tab below.

Blizzard QA Zorbrix has also noted that, as the Patch 6.1 PTR builds are release candidates, character copies are disabled:

Level 90-94 gold and Garrison Resource missions will now continue to appear even if there are no Followers that are level 90-94.

Barn Level 3 traps can now be placed on top of a trap that has already been sprung.

The fireplace in Tier-2 and Tier-3 Alliance Garrison Town Halls can now be used as a cooking fire.

Improvements have been made to the way that cosmetic transformations are handled. Previously, using another transformation would overwrite or cancel an existing effect. Now, characters can retain multiple cosmetic transformations and the one with the highest priority will be visible. If a higher priority transformation is canceled or expires, the next highest priority transformation will then be visible.

Cosmetic transformation effects that don't have mount animations and previously prevented a character from mounting (or were canceled upon mounting) are no longer canceled or need to be canceled or prevent mounting. Instead, the transform is temporarily suppressed and the character will regain the transformation once they dismount.

Many Druid shapeshift forms now have attachment points on the head and back for cosmetic toy effects such as Blazing Wings or Pepe. Additional shapeshift forms may receive attachment points in the future.

Blazing Wings effect now lasts for 15 minutes (down from 1 hour) with a 30-minute cooldown (down from 1 hour).

Piccolo of the Flaming Fire has been rebuilt into a Toy Box item. Players can channel for 30 seconds to cause those around them to dance with a 5-minute cooldown. Additionally, the effect will no longer interrupt eating or drinking.

All rings, neck, cloak, and trinket items that can be acquired in Nagrand (A level 98+ zone) or later should now be better suited for the character's loot specialization. This means tanks should no longer receive items with no bonus Armor and healers should no longer receive items with no Spirit from sources like item tokens, quests, or Personal loot mode in Dungeons and Raids for those item slots.

Accounts with an inactive subscription are now able to log in with the same restrictions that Starter Edition accounts have with the additional perk of being able to join guilds that characters on the account already are a member of.

New Graphics Options: Particle Density in graphics settings now have 3 detail levels (down from 5). This may affect the number of particles generated by some particle systems.

Halo now displays an indicator on the ground to make it easier for the casting Priest see where the ability is most effective. Additionally, Halo's visual effect has been synchronized so a character will receive the effect when the nova intersects with them.

Psychic Scream (Shadow) now has a 30-second cooldown (up from 45 seconds).

Frozen Power should no longer cause Frost Shock to trigger a new Mastery: Molten Earth (Elemental). Note that this does not stop Molten Earth effects that are already in progress or in the process of being triggered.

One of five new visitors may visit each day offering a quest to anyone that visits the Garrison.

Defeat a dungeon boss: Awards a bag with a chance to contain a level 630, 645, or 655 item token.

Defeat a raid boss (weekly quest): Awards a bag with a chance to contain a level 645, or 655 item token.

Bounty (intended for 3 or more players): Defeat a named elite NPC for a bag containing Apexis Crystals, and a chance to contain a level 645, or 655 item token.

Relic: Complete a series of quests to recover a relic for a bag containing Apexis Crystals, and a chance to contain a level 645, or 655 item token. Completing a relic mission unlocks it as a potential mission for your followers. Completing all 6 relic missions will unlock Harrison Jones as a follower!

Profession: Turn-in tradeskill reagents for Primal Spirits and work order tradeskill reagents.

Treasure Hunter trait increases the amount of gold rewarded from a mission.

Garrison Followers

Garrison Followers may now be upgraded to item level 675.

Follower Missions

New Profession Missions are now available on upgrading a profession building to level 3. Successfully completing these missions award an item that allows instant completion of work orders (Rush Orders).

Players can unlock Relic and Bounty missions for their followers by completing the corresponding Relic or Bounty quest offered by one of the random daily new visitors to the Garrison.

New exploration missions are available to players with a skill of at least 1 in Archeology. Successfully completing these missions can award Archeology fragments, keystones, or treasure maps for a Draenor zone. Treasure maps obtained in this manner does not require quest achievement completion for the Draenor zone.

Level 90-94 gold and Garrison Resource missions will now continue to appear even if there are no Followers that are level 90-94.

Scavenger trait for Followers now increases Garrison Resources gained from a mission by 100% (down from 200%).

Follower Mission UI Improvements

List of missions available now displays the amount of bonus XP, gold, and resources awarded without having to mouse-over the mission tooltip.

Improved tooltips displaying which followers that can counter threats on a mission.

Followers that can counter a threat and available show up with a green checkmark.

Followers that can counter a threat but are out on a mission displays the time remaining until the follower is available.

Followers that can counter a threat but assigned to a building will display a working icon.

A new icon will notify the player when assigning a follower that'll receive less XP reward because they're below level or item level requirements.Garrisons with 10 or more followers now have access to a sortable list with a quick overview of how many followers can counter a particular threat or how long a follower will be out on a mission.

Garrison Buildings

Garrison Work Order Changes

Work orders now check if a follower is assigned to the building every 4 hours when factoring in production bonuses.

Followers assigned to work at a building now receive XP for each work order that they provide a production bonus on.

Players now have an option to queue up all remaining work order slots through the building's work order UI.

NPCs that accept Work Orders are now titled as such along with a new interaction cursor to make them easier to locate.

Miner's Coffee no longer has a stack limit, is now bind on pickup, and has a sell price. It now has an exclusive category so it cannot be applied multiple times by splitting it into different stacks. However, the aura can now correctly stack up to 5 times.

Tier-3 salvage recovered from Follower missions no longer has an independent chance to drop an uncommon (green), rare (blue), or epic (purple) item and will instead always drop one of them. This change is intended to reduce overall item spam without affecting their value. Existing chance for Tier-3 salvage to potentially also contain an uncommon Tier-2 salvage item remains unchanged.

Follower Weaponry and Armor Set tokens (War Ravaged, Blackrock, Goredrenched) no longer drops from salvage. Weapon and Armor enhancement tokens that can upgrade a Follower's weapon or armor item levels will continue to have a chance to drop from Salvage Crates.

Town Hall

The fireplace in Tier-2 and Tier-3 Alliance Garrison Town Halls can now be used as a cooking fire.

Players that have performed above-and-beyond expectations for a Gold rating while defending their Garrisons from an invasion can now attain a Platinum rating. Platinum rating awards a level 660 item and a chance at obtaining an item that can be used to summon a raid or world boss.

Cosmetic Transformations and Toy Effects

Improvements have been made to the way that cosmetic transformations are handled. Previously, using another transformation would overwrite or cancel an existing effect. Now, characters can retain multiple cosmetic transformations and the one with the highest priority will be visible. If a higher priority transformation is canceled or expires, the next highest priority transformation will then be visible.

Cosmetic transformation effects that don't have mount animations and previously prevented a character from mounting (or were canceled upon mounting) are no longer canceled or need to be canceled or prevent mounting. Instead, the transform is temporarily suppressed and the character will regain the transformation once they dismount.

Cosmetic transformations that alter the character's appearance now have a higher priority than Druid combat forms. This means Druids can keep a transformation while shapeshifted.

Many Druid shapeshift forms now have attachment points on the head and back for cosmetic toy effects such as Blazing Wings or Pepe. Additional shapeshift forms may receive attachment points in the future.

To retain and improve readability in rated PvP environments, cosmetic transformations are now suppressed for all classes while inside a rated PvP environment (Arenas or Rated Battlegrounds).

General

Accounts with an inactive subscription are now able to log in with the same restrictions that Starter Edition accounts have with the additional perk of being able to join guilds that characters on the account already are a member of.

New Graphics Options

Particle Density in graphics settings now have 3 detail levels (down from 5). This may affect the number of particles generated by some particle systems.

MSAA is once again supported, with additional controls for fine-tuning under Advanced graphics options.

A new SSAA anti-aliasing option is now available for high-end video cards.

New Lighting

Per-pixel deferred point lights have been added to create more realistic lighting throughout Draenor.

Itemization

Tertiary Stats for Avoidance, Speed, and Leach now provide about four times as much benefit per stat point.

All rings, neck, cloak, and trinket items that can be acquired in Nagrand (A level 98+ zone) or later should now be better suited for the character's loot specialization. This means tanks should no longer receive items with no bonus Armor and healers should no longer receive items with no Spirit from sources like item tokens, quests or Personal loot mode in Dungeons and Raids for those item slots.

Stoneform when used, now triggers a 30-second shared cooldown with other PvP trinkets that breaks crowd-control effects.

Class Changes Talent BalanceDeveloper Commentary: A primary focus for class changes in Patch 6.1 is improving overall talent balance. Not every talent needs to be useful in every situation; and in fact it's often better if they have strengths and weaknesses. But we do try to have each talent be useful in some situations, and make them close enough in value that if you really enjoy the gameplay of a talent you don't feel like you're dragging your group down by using it.For these changes we focused primarily on tuning (tweaking numbers), and nearly all changes are buffs to underperforming talents. The goal is to reach more variety of viable builds, without bringing down the existing popular choices.

Ring of Peace now incapacitates all enemies for 5 seconds (up from 3 seconds).

Zen Sphere has been improved. Its detonation damage has increased by 97%, detonation healing has increased by 70%, but periodic healing has been reduced by 39%. Also fixed a bug that caused its damage and healing to vary based on specialization.

Cascade may now hit the same target twice. This results in an increase to total healing, so its healing has been reduced by 35% to compensate (the total healing in a 20-player raid will be slightly higher than before).

Halo now displays an indicator on the ground to make it easier for the casting Priest see where the ability is most effective. Additionally, Halo's visual effect has been synchronized so a character will receive the effect when the nova intersects with them.

Psychic Scream (Shadow) now has a 30-second cooldown (up from 45 seconds).

Saving Grace's (Discipline, Holy) healing has increased by 50%, but now reduces future healing dealt by 15% (up from 10%). Additionally, the talent is now instant-cast, but its effectiveness is reduced while in PvP combat.

Healer DamageDeveloper Commentary: Another change being made for Patch 6.1 is to bring the damage potential of healers up to a level that is sufficient and balanced. Healers' damage potential will still pale compared to that of a dedicated damage dealer or tank, but it should no longer feel like you're totally ineffective when attempting to do some outdoor content.

PvP 4-piece set bonus for Holy Paladins has been redesigned. Eternal Flame or Word of Glory now also reduces damage taken by the target by 5% for each Holy Power consumed (maximum of 15%) for 6 seconds. This effect only works in PvP combat.

Frozen Power should no longer cause Frost Shock to trigger a new Mastery: Molten Earth (Elemental). Note that this does not stop Molten Earth effects that are already in progress or in the process of being triggered.

Tier-17 4-piece bonus for Elemental Shaman now requires the Shaman to consume 12 18Lightning Shield charges to trigger (down up from 15 charges).

PvP 2-piece set bonus for Restoration Shaman now grants 975 Versatility after dispelling a harmful Magic or Curse effect from an ally (up from 780 Versatility).

PvP 4-piece set bonus for Restoration Shaman now triggers when the target of Earth Shield drops below 50% health (up from 35%) and Earth Shield will immediately consume up to 4 charges (up from 3 charges).

Players in a raid group will once again no longer be eligible for quest credit, except for specially-designated Raid quests. We are continuing to explore ways of allowing players who want to engage in solo or small-group questing while in a raid group (for example, while waiting for a Highmaul raid to form, or in a Rated Battleground queue), without also allowing raid groups to trivially complete quests that were never designed with groups of that size in mind.

Legendary Ring Quest Line

A new epic follower awaits those that complete the latest chapter in the Legendary Ring Quest Line!

Characters can now select the version of the ring they want to receive when completing a step of the Legendary Ring Quest Line that provides an upgrade.

Improved the logic used for connecting flight paths. Players are now able to fly through flight points that they have not discovered yet if it'll result in a more direct flight path to a destination point.

A button has been added for characters in the middle of a flight to get off at the next known flight point.

Added two mailboxes in around the Black Market near Ring Of Blood in Nagrand.

The Darkmoon Faire have added an exciting new racing event with opportunities to obtain new unique prizes!

New achievements and rewards have been added to the Darkmoon Tonk Challenge and Darkmoon Ring Toss.

Creatures and NPCs

Khadgar has decided to dismiss his remarkably realistic mirror images from capital cities across the land. Adventurers answering his summons and seeking to enter Draenor may once again only find him near the Dark Portal in Blasted Lands.

Grand Marshal Tremblade or High Warlord Volrath now offers scrolls of Enchant Illusion – Glorious Tyranny and Enchant Illusion – Primal Victory to players with a rating of 2400 or higher in Rated Battlegrounds, and 3v3 or 5v5 Arenas.

Flask of Conquest has been added as a potential drop from Strongboxes awarded at the end of a Rated Battleground match. The flask increases Conquest Point gains from Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds by 25% for 2 hours and the effect persists through death. The flask does not affect the character's Conquest cap and the drop chance is in addition to the existing chance for Strongboxes to contain Conquest Points.

Rewards are now correctly distributed based on the PvP level bracket.

Primal Gladiator's and Primal Combatant's Badges now have a 2-minute cooldown (up from 1 minute).

Apexis Crystal vendors have been reorganized with their titles now denoting what it is that they're selling.

Toybox

Blazing Wings effect now lasts for 15 minutes (down from 1 hour) with a 30-minute cooldown (down from 1 hour).

Piccolo of the Flaming Fire has been rebuilt into a Toybox item. Players can channel for 30 seconds to cause those around them to dance with a 5-minute cooldown. Additionally, the effect will no longer interrupt eating or drinking.

Characters now receive a treasure maps in the mail for completing storyline achievements for a Draenor region.Griftah now sells a variety of transmogrification items for Dingy Iron Coins. In addition, he now sells a Rogue-specific toy, Barrel of Bandanas. Barrel of Bandanas spawns a barrel that gives players that use it a random visual bandana buff for 30 minutes. Season 1 PvP boots and belts sold by Kezzik at Area 52 in Netherstorm are now more comparably priced to their other Season 1 counterparts (1750 Honor). Replica belts for Blood Guard and Knight-Lieutenant have been added to complete visual sets that were previously incomplete for transmogrification. These new items are sold by the vendors who sell the rest of the set, Tini Smalls and Krixel Pinchwhistle at Area 52 in Netherstorm. All Brawler's Guild shirts are now unique. Replacement Brawler's Guild shirts can be purchased from Quackenbrush or Paul North if the character has defeated a boss that awarded it. Several trinkets obtained from Draenor rares are now able to be disenchanted (previously, the items could not be disenchanted).A number of Main Hand weapons have been converted to One-Hand so they'll work better with transmogrification.

Players can now access a new suite of colorblind filter options under Accessiblity settings in the Interface menu.

New Death Recap Screen

When a character is killed, a new screen now shows more information on what killed you.

Premade Group leaders can now automatically accept applicants via a new "Auto Accept" checkbox after the group has been listed. Improved the ordering for categories in the currency tab.Loot eligibility lockouts for Draenor world bosses (Drov the Ruiner, Tarlna the Ageless, and Rukhmar) are now tracked in Raid Info under the Raid tab. Popup notifications such as those for completing an achievement or receiving a reward after a Battleground match can now be dismissed by right-clicking on it. Added an "Ignore this bag" option to Profession bags for bag clean up. All multi-page windows now supports mousewheel scrolling.

Blizzard has released the final patch notes for tomorrow's Patch 6.0.2: The Iron Tide! We can't do our usual TL;DR, as these are the final notes, and nothing is marked as changed. We've also added in the latest round of beta class changes--these are hotfixes, and as such, cannot be datamined and visible on Wowhead tooltips just quite yet.

WoW now at 7.4 Million Subscribers

Blizzard published a press release today, detailing that WoW was at 7.4 million subscribers on September 30th. This 600,000 sub gain is no doubt an indication of the excitement at the end of a content drought. This is no doubt welcome news for Blizzard after the most recent investor call had the game at 6.8 million.

The latest Warlords of Draenor Patch Notes are here, and we're working on trimming them down for you right now!Here's the major changes that aren't class-specific, and our class-by-class breakdown. For the full notes expand the box at the bottom of the page!

Dancing Rune Weapon now lasts 8 seconds (down from 12 seconds).

Icebound Fortitude now lasts 8 seconds (down from 12 seconds).

Rune of the Fallen Crusader now increases Strength by 20% (up from 15%).

Vampiric Blood now increases the amount of healing received by 15% (down from 25%).

Glyph of Vampiric Blood now increases the amount of healing received by an additional 10% (down from 15%).

Blood Presence now increases Stamina by 20% (down from 25%), and armor by 30% (down from 55%).

Bone Shield charges can now be consumed at a rate of once per second (up from once every 2 seconds).

Rune Tap has been redesigned. It now reduces all damage taken by 40% 50% for 3 seconds. It also now has 2 charges, with a 40-second recharge time.

Veteran of the Third War now increases Multistrike chance, and haste, and Stamina by 10% (instead of up from 9% to Stamina), reduces the chance for attacks to be parried by 3%, increases the damage of Death Strike by 100%, and grants 1 Runic Power per second while in combat.

For consolidation of abilities, we merged several passive abilities. One notable change is the merging of the Ravage into Shred, and Pounce into Rake; saving a couple keybinds that were only used in conjunction with Prowl. The loss of Symbiosis primarily impacted Druid survivability, as many of the abilities received through Symbiosis were defensive cooldowns. To compensate for that, we improved Barkskin (for non-Feral Druids) and Survival Instincts (for Feral and Guardian Druids).

Barkskin's cooldown has been reduced to 30 seconds.

Survival Instincts no longer requires or forces the Druid into Cat or Bear Form, and now lasts 6 seconds (down from 12 seconds) reduces damage taken by 70% (up from 50%) with a 2-minute cooldown (down from 3 minutes), and can have up to 2 charges (up from 1 charge).

Bear Form now increases armor by 180% 330% for all Druid specializations (down from 330% for Guardian Druids, but up from 120% for non-Guardian Druids), no longer increases Haste and Critical Strike from items by 50%, but instead causes Haste to reduce the global cooldown, increases Stamina by 20% (down from 40%), and reduces magic damage taken by 10% (down from 25%).

Ursa Major causes Multistrikes from auto attacks, Lacerate periodic damage, and Mangle to grant the Druid the Ursa Major effect. Ursa Major increases maximum health by 2% for 25 30 seconds. When the effect is refreshed, the remaining portion is added to the new effect.

Primal Fury now generates 5 Rage (down from 15 Rage) from when you dodge or non-periodic critical strikes (up from only Auto Attacks and Mangle).

Savage Defense can now accumulate 2 charges (down from 3 charges), and regenerates a charge every 12 seconds (up from 9 seconds).

No Changes

No Changes

Fortifying Brew now lasts 15 seconds (down from 20 seconds).

Healing Spheres generated from Gift of the Ox now heals the Monk if they are within 6 yards of the sphere when it expires.

Stance of the Sturdy Ox now increases Stamina by 25% 40% (up from 20%), reduces magic damage taken by 10% (down from all damage taken by 25%), and grants a 50% increase to Armor, but no longer increases Energy regeneration.

Shuffle now increases Stagger and Parry by 10% (down from 20%).

Divine Protection now lasts 8 seconds (down from 10 seconds).

Guardian of Ancient Kings now lasts 8 seconds (down from 12 seconds).

Judgment is now naturally free for Holy Paladins, and naturally generates 1 Holy Power for Protection and Retribution Paladins.

Mastery: Divine Bulwark now increases damage reduction from Shield of the Righteous by 6% (scaling with Mastery, down from starting at 8%), and causes Bastion of Glory to increase healing received from Word of Glory by 6% (scaling with Mastery, down from starting at 8%).

Sanctuary now reduces damage taken by 10% (down from 15), and no longer increases Armor.

Guarded by the Light now increases Stamina by 15% (down from 25%), and increases block chance by 5% (down from 10%).

Shield of the Righteous now reduces physical damage taken by 20% (down from 25%).

Bastion of Glory now increases Word of Glory’s healing by 6% per stack (down from 10% per stack).

Shield Block now regenerates a new charge every 12 seconds (up from every 9 seconds).

Unwavering Sentinel no longer increases Armor, but now also reduces the chance for attacks to be parried by 3%.

Stats that are not useful to the current class specialization will be grayed out in the tooltip rather than green, and will not be counted on the character stat sheet.

These stats include:

Spirit for non-healing specializations

Bonus Armor for non-tanking specializations

Strength for Agility/Intellect-users

Agility for Strength/Intellect-users

Intellect for Strength/Agility-users

For example, Intellect on a cloak will be greyed out for all Warrior specializations and they will not receive an increase to Intellect if the cloak is equipped. However, if the same cloak is equipped by a Mage; Intellect will show up in green and they’ll receive the increase to their Intellect.

In an effort to reduce the physical mitigation of some classes, we've modified the amount of Armor provided by some armor types.

Plate, Mail, and Shields now have less Armor relative to Cloth and Leather armor.

Doubling player health gave us room to reduce Resilience and Battle Fatigue, but our goal was to be able to remove them entirely. In order to achieve that, we’re also reducing PvP spike damage across the board by lowering Critical Damage and Critical Heals against players in PvP to 150% of their normal effect (down from 200%). The changes have allowed us to reduce base Resilience to 0%, and Battle Fatigue to 20%. Our hope is that these changes allow us to reduce Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue to 0%. It’s possible that we’ll still find a need for some minor amount of Base Resilience and/or Battle Fatigue, and we’ll be testing these changes extensively and adjusting as needed.

Base Resilience has been reduced to 0%.

Battle Fatigue has been reduced to 20% (down from 60%). removed. PvP combat no longer reduces the amount of healing received by participants.

Critical Damage and Critical Heals in PvP combat now deal 150% of the normal spell/ability effects (down from 200%).

Stoneform now also removes magic and curse effects in addition to poison, disease, bleed effects, and reduces physical along with reducing damage taken by 10% for 8 seconds (down from all damage taken). It remains unusable while the Dwarf is under the effects of crowd control.

Resolve: Increases self-healing and absorption based on Stamina and damage taken (before avoidance and mitigation) in the last 10 seconds. Without Resolve, Tanks now deal significantly less self-healing and absorption. Resolve has been made much stronger to counteract this, and it increases the amount of self-healing and absorption as appropriate for the fight.

Patch 6.0.2, the pre-expansion patch for Warlords of Draenor™ is now available for testing on the Public Test Realms (PTR)! Participating on the Public Test Realms lets you test content and features before it's available on the live realms. If you'd like to help test and provide feedback, you can start by copying a character and setting up the PTR game client by selecting PTR from the account/game region dropdown list in the Battle.net Desktop App. Once you've had a chance to try things out, be sure to visit our PTR Discussion forum to discuss the patch, and the PTR Bug Report forum to report any issues or errors.

For more information about Beta testing for Warlords of Draenor and how you can opt in for a chance to participate in the Beta test, check out World of Warcraft®: Warlords of Draenor™ Beta Test Begins!

PTR Disclaimers

Please keep in mind that the notes below are not final, and a great deal could change before the release of Patch 6.0.2.

Not all the content listed may be available for testing or may only be available during a limited testing window. Keep an eye on the PTR Discussion forum for further details.

New Features

New Character Models

Character models for races from the original game Dwarf, Gnome, Human, Night Elf, Orc, Tauren, Troll, Undead, and Draenei have been overhauled with an increase to fidelity and texture resolution; while retaining the core look and feel of the originals. (Click here to see Wowhead's playlist of new character models).

Character animations have been updated to have more personality and now support expressive facial expressions. Emotes are now more emotive!

The Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands has turned blood red. Hundreds of strange-looking orcs are violently pouring into Azeroth, killing everything that stands in their path. Nethergarde and Okril’lon have already fallen, and while the Horde and the Alliance moved as quickly as they could to get reinforcements to their people, they are too late. The Iron Horde invasion has begun.

Adventurers looking to dislodge the Iron Horde’s attempts to establish a foothold on Azeroth should visit the Blasted Lands.

A specially revamped five-player version of Upper Blackrock Spire is available to level-90 characters for a limited time, and sets the stage for the coming counterstrike against the Iron Horde.

Group Finder received an upgrade and expanded to facilitate players trying to create groups for both PvE and PvP content. Browsing or creating a Premade Group can be done via Group Finder (Bound to the I key by default) or the Player vs. Player pane (Bound to the H key by default.)

Fun items accumulated through the course of travels now have a new home in the Toy Box. Eligible items can be learned by right-clicking on the item in the inventory. Once learned, the item is available account-wide and accessible to all characters on the account.

Want to complete the collection? Like the Mount and Pet Journal, items that haven’t been unlocked yet will show information on how the item can be obtained.

Bags can now be assigned to a specific item type (Equipment, Consumables, and Trade Goods). The bag will display a mini-icon showing what type of item it's assigned to.

Added a "Clean up Bags" button to automatically sort items in the character’s inventory, moving all empty slots to one area, and automatically sorting items to the correct bag. There’s also the option to ignore a bag from cleanup.

Reagent Bank

A Reagent Bank tab has been added to the Bank providing storage for raw materials.

Characters can now craft using the materials stored in both their Reagent Bank and Bank from anywhere.

Characters can visit the bank to unlock the new Reagent Bank tab providing additional storage space for profession materials.

New Void Storage Tab

Characters can now purchase an additional tab for Void Storage. That’s an extra 98 spaces!

Character and Class Changes

Introduction to Character and Class Changes

Welcome to a look at character and class changes. We're trying a new patch note format, which we hope will help better convey the reasoning for many of the changes being made and what they mean for you, while providing more background into issues we're trying to solve.

Please be aware that the patch notes are preliminary and not final. Details may change before retail release.

Looking for a TL;DR summary of the character and class changes? Here you go!

Character stats have been squished into smaller numbers that are easier to understand. It's important to understand that this is nota nerf as enemies' stats have been squished as well.

Balanced functionality of Agility, Strength and Intellect.

New secondary stats: Bonus Armor, Multistrike, and Versatility.

Hit and Expertise have been removed; they're no longer needed in order to reliably land attacks!

The pacing of healing has been adjusted to allow for more tactical decision-making regarding efficiency and throughput, on both single-target and multi-target heals. Passive and auto-targeted healing have been reduced in effectiveness in order to emphasize the actions and choices of healers.

Racial traits have been rebalanced so that all races have similar combat performance.

All classes have had several abilities pruned, with a focus on redundant and less-used abilities to cut down on button and keybind bloat.

Amount of crowd-control in the game (primarily PvP) has been drastically reduced. Many crowd-control abilities have been removed, and many diminishing returns categories have been merged together.

Several common buffs and debuffs have been merged, or removed, where they were redundant.

All characters now learn some important Major Glyphs automatically as they level up.

Toned down the amount of instant healing in the game by giving cast times to several instant cast heals.

For Tanks, Vengeance has been redesigned and renamed Resolve.

Resolve does not increase outgoing damage, but does now increases tank self-healing and absorption based on damage taken.

Facing requirements (character positioning) on some prominent abilities have been loosened or removed.

Reduced Mana cost of Resurrection spells to make it a little easier to recover from a wipe.

Professions no longer have combat benefit perks tied to them.

A multitude of class-specific changes, things like improved distinction between different Talent specializations, and new Masteries. Please consult class-specific sections below for more information.

Stat Squish

Character progression is one of the defining characteristics of a role-playing game. Naturally, that means that we're continuously adding more power to the game for players to acquire. After 4 expansions and over 9 years of this growth, we've gotten to a point where the numbers involved are no longer easy to grasp. And worse, much of the granularity that's available is tied up in tiers of older content from A Molten Core to Dragon Soul, none of which are really relevant anymore. It's no longer necessary for Borean Tundra quest gear to be nearly twice as powerful as Netherstorm quest gear, even though the two zones are only a couple of levels apart.In order to bring things down to an understandable level, we've reduced the scale of stats throughout the game, back to as if they continued scaling linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 90. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear, other items... everything. Your stats and damage have been reduced by a huge amount, but so have creatures' health. For example, your Fireball that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of its 3,000,000 health (15% of its health), may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health). In effect, you will still be just as powerful, but the numbers that appear will be more easily parsed.It's important to understand that this isn't a nerf, and we have special handling in place to preserve players' existing ability to solo old content. Players will deal bonus damage against lower-level creatures from past expansions, and will take reduced damage from them.

We've also removed all base damage on player spells and abilities, and adjusted Attack Power or Spell Power scaling as needed, so that all specializations will scale at the same rate.

The amount of stats on items has been reduced to be much lower than before.

Creature stats have been reduced to compensate.

We've also streamlined the multitude of various types of Haste and Critical Strike bonuses.

Spell Haste, Melee Haste, and Ranged Haste have been merged into a universal Haste %.

Spell Crit, Melee Crit, and Ranged Crit have been merged into a universal Crital Strike chance.

Primary Character Stats and Attack Power

The "primary" stats, Agility, Strength, and Intellect, are foundations of a character's power. But they have not been created equally, making it difficult to properly balance them against secondary stats. The leading reason for this is that Agility and Intellect also provide Critical Strike chance, in addition to Attack Power or Spell Power, whereas Strength does not. In order to achieve better balance, we've removed the Critical Strikechance increase from Agility and Intellect. Still, it felt like Agility-based characters should critically strike more often, so we've raised those classes' baseline Critical Strike chance to compensate.

Agility no longer provides an increased chance to critically strike with melee and ranged attacks or abilities.

Intellect no longer provides an increased chance to critically strike with spells.

The base chance to critically strike is now 5% for all classes. There are no longer different chances to critically strike with melee, ranged, and spells.

There is a new passive, named Critical Strikes, which increases chance to critically strike by 10%.

It is learned by all Rogues, all Hunters, Feral and Guardian Druids, Brewmaster and Windwalker Monks, and Enhancement Shaman.

"The "primary" stats, Agility, Strength, and Intellect, are foundations of a character's power. But they have not been created equally, making it difficult to properly balance them against secondary stats." We've consolidated the way that Attack Power and Spell Power function and scale, to make those values clearer and correct some scaling issues regarding caster weapons relative to physical weapons.

Each point of Agility or Strength now grants 1 Attack Power (down from 2). All other sources of Attack Power now grant half as much as before.

Weapon Damage values on all weapons have been reduced by 50%.

Attack Power now increases Weapon Damage at a rate of 1 DPS per 3.5 Attack Power (up from 1 DPS per 14 Attack Power).

Attack Power, Spell Power, or Weapon Damage now affect the entire healing or damage throughput of player spells.

Active mitigation has worked very well as a tanking model. So, moving forward we want to keep the amount of Dodge and Parry on tanks on the low side. This helps prevent encounters from causing very spiky damage on tanks, which generally isn't much fun. Dodge and Parry gains from Strength and Agility are being reduced to help accomplish this. Additionally, items in Warlords of Draenor will not have Dodge or Parry on them as a stat. Some Dodge and Parry can still be gained through class-specific effects.

The amount of Dodge gained per point of Agility has been reduced by 25%.

The amount of Parry gained per point of Strength has been reduced by 25%.

Itemization Changes

We're making a number of changes to itemization based on a single philosophy: We want to increase the chance that any given item drop is useful to someone in your group. To support this philosophy we're making a few changes to stats. Most items found in Draenor will work for all specializations within a given class, so that you never have to grumble when you see, for example, Intellect plate drop in a group that lacks a .

We're also reducing the number of role-specific stats: Hit and Expertise are gone, as are Dodge and Parry as stats on items, replaced with a single tank stat of Bonus Armor. Armor and Spirit will be specific to tanks and healers respectively, but all other secondary stats will have universal appeal.

Because of the magnitude of this change, we're retroactively applying this philosophy to items in Mists of Pandaria. After the pre-expansion patch you may find that some of your items contribute different stats, but they should still be good for your class.General

New secondary stats added:

Bonus Armor: Increases Armor and Attack Power for tanking specializations.

Multistrike: Grants a chance for spells and abilities to fire up to 2 additional times, at 30% effectiveness (both damage and healing).

Hit and Expertise on all items have been replaced with a universally useful secondary stat.Stats that are not useful to your current class specialization will be grayed out in the tooltip rather than green, and will not be counted on your character stat sheet.

Spirit for non-healing specializations

Bonus Armor for non-tanking specializations

Strength for Agility/Intellect-users

Agility for Strength/Intellect-users

Intellect for Strength/Agility-users

For example, Intellect on a cloak will be greyed out for all Warrior specializations and they will not receive an increase to Intellect if equipped. However, if the same cloak is equipped by a Mage; Intellect will show up as green and they'll receive the increase to their Intellect.

Mists of Pandaria and Future Items

Dodge and Parry have been replaced with Bonus Armor. If an item had both Dodge and Parry on it, it has been replaced with an additional useful secondary stat.

Mail and Leather Armor pieces will always have Agility and Intellect on it.

In an effort to reduce the physical mitigation of some classes, we've modified the amount of Armor provided by some armor types.

Plate, Mail, and Shields now have less Armor relative to Cloth and Leather armor.

Hit and Expertise Removal

Hit and Expertise were not fun stats. They acted to remove a penalty, instead of making you stronger. Most players treated Hit/Expertise caps as mandatory (rightfully so), with failure to reach those caps as a trap of sorts. After adjusting, gemming, and reforging gear to meet that cap, players could then go after the actual damage-increasing stats. We decided to remove Hit and Expertise, and make it so you don't need them. We still want melee specializations to attack creatures from behind when possible, so attacks from the front will have a 3% chance to be parried that cannot be eliminated for non-tanking specializations.

Hit and Expertise has been removed as a secondary stat.

Hit and Expertise bonuses on all items and item enhancements (gems, enchants, etc.) have been converted into Critical Strike, Haste, or Mastery.

General

All players now have a 100% chance to hit, 0% chance to be dodged, 3% chance to be parried, and 0% chance to glance, when fighting creatures up to 3 levels higher (bosses included).

Tanking specializations receive an additional 3% reduction in chance to be parried, so tank attacks have a 0% chance to be parried vs. creatures up to 3 levels higher.

Creatures that are 4 or more levels higher than you still have a chance to avoid your attacks in various ways, so as to discourage you from attempting to fight enemies that are much stronger than you.

Dual Wielding still imposes a 19% chance to miss, so as to balance it with two-handed weapon use.

Hit and Expertise bonuses on all items and item enhancements (gems, enchants, etc.) have been converted into Critical Strike, Haste, or Mastery.

Veteran of the Third War now increases your critical strike chance, Multistrike chance, haste, and Stamina by 10% (up from 9% to Stamina only), reduces the chance for attacks to be parried by 3%, and increases the damage of Death Strike by 100%.

Secondary Stat Attunements (New Section)

A new concept that we're introducing is each specialization having an attunement to a particular secondary stat. These take the form of a passive ability that grants a 5% increase to the amount of a specific secondary stat gained. This provides a good starting point for where to focus your secondary stats. Usually, it will be your highest throughput stat (not counting Spirit for Healers, and Bonus Armor for Tanks, which is an optimal secondary stat in most cases). There are exceptions, and raw throughput may not even be the biggest concern in some situations. Treat this as a guideline, not a rule, about which secondary stat to favor.

All specializations now receive a 5% bonus to specific secondary stat bonuses received from all sources. This bonus is granted through new passive abilities or additional effects added to existing passive abilities.

New passive abilities granting a 5% bonus to specific secondary stat bonuses received from equipped items have been added for all specializations.

Player Health and Resilience

We're planning several interconnected changes designed to provide better-tuned gameplay for healers and improve the healing dynamic in PvP.

The high amount of base Resilience and Battle Fatigue in Mists of Pandaria caused characters to feel much weaker in PvP than they did in PvE. To address this disparity, we're approaching Warlords of Draenor with the goal of shrinking that gap as much as possible. To reduce dependence on Resilience, we needed to increase player survivability against other players, and we chose to do this by essentially doubling (post-squish) player health.

On its own, that increase in health would make players more survivable in the world at large, so we're also increasing creature damage and the effectiveness of healing spells to balance things out. The net result of these changes is that individual attacks will knock a smaller chunk off of a player's health pool in PvP, but your survivability in PvE remains unaffected.

Doubling player health gave us room to reduce Resilience and Battle Fatigue, but our goal was to be able to remove them entirely. In order to achieve that, we're also reducing PvP spike damage across the board by lowering Critical Damage and Critical Heals against players in PvP to 150% of their normal effect (down from 200%). The changes have allowed us to reduce base Resilience to 0%, and Battle Fatigue to 20%. Our hope is that these changes allow us to reduce Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue to 0%. It’s possible that we’ll still find a need for some minor amount of Base Resilience and/or Battle Fatigue, and we’ll be testing these changes extensively and adjusting as needed.

Changes to PvP

Base Resilience has been reduced to 0%.

Battle Fatigue has been reduced to 20% (down from 60%). removed. PvP combat no longer reduces the amount of healing received by participants.

Critical Damage and Critical Heals in PvP combat now deal 150% of the normal spell/ability effects (down from 200%).

Changes to Health Pools

Amount of health gained per Stamina point has been doubled. The curve on this calculation has been smoothed out as well, so exact amount varies slightly by level.

Maximum mana has been doubled at all levels to keep pace with expected increases to maximum health from new Stamina values.

All consumables now restore twice as much health and mana.

All creatures had their melee damage doubled. Most creature spells and abilities have had their damage doubled as well.

Retuning Healing Spells

One of our goals for healing is to tone down the raw throughput of healers relative to the size of player health pools. Currently, as healers and their allies acquire better and better gear, the percentage of a player's health that any given heal restores increases significantly. As a result, healers are able to refill health bars so fast that we have to make damage more and more “bursty” in order to challenge them. Ideally, we want players to spend some time below full health without having healers feel like their groupmates are in danger of dying at any moment. We also think that healer gameplay would be more varied, interesting, and skillful if your allies spent more time between 0% and 100%, rather than just getting damaged quickly to low health, forcing the healer to then scramble to get them back to 100% as quickly as possible.To that end, we're buffing heals less than we're increasing player health. Heals will be deliberately less potent compared to health pools than before the item squish. Additionally, as gear improves, the scaling rates of health and healing will now be very similar, so the relative power of any given healing spell shouldn't climb so much over the course of this expansion. For those concerned about what this means for raiding, don't worry—we're taking all of these changes into account when designing Raid content for Warlords of Draenor.

It's also important to note that spells that heal based on a percentage of maximum health are being effectively buffed by the massive increase to player health pools, so we're lowering those percentages to offset the effect. That may make them appear to have been nerfed—however, the net result is that those percentage-based heals stay about the same as before relative to other heals.

All of these changes apply to damage-absorption shields as well. Additionally, we're toning down the power of damage absorption in general. When they get too strong, absorption effects are often used in place of direct healing, instead of as a way to supplement it. We will, of course, take these changes into account when tuning specializations that rely heavily on absorbs, such as Discipline Priests. "We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using..." We also took a look at healing spells that were passive or auto-targeted (so-called "smart" heals). We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using, so that their decisions matter more. To that end, we're reducing the healing of many passive and auto-targeted heals, and making smart heals a little less smart. Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets, of course.

Another of our goals for healing in this expansion is to strike a better balance between single-target and multi-target healing spells. We've taken a close look at the mana efficiency of our multi-target heals, and in many cases, we're reducing their efficiency, usually by reducing the amount they heal. Sometimes, but more rarely, raising their mana cost was a better decision. We want players to use multi-target heals, but they should only be better than their single-target equivalents when they heal more than two players without any overhealing. This way, players will face a meaningful choice between whether to use a single-target heal or a multi-target heal based on the situation.

Finally, we're removing the low-throughput, low-mana-cost heals like Nourish, Holy Light, Heal, and Healing Wave, because we think that while they do add complexity, they don't truly add depth to healing gameplay. (We're also renaming some spells to re-use those names. For example, Greater Healing Wave is being redubbed Healing Wave.) However, we still want healers to think about their mana when deciding which heal to cast, and so the mana costs and throughputs of many spells are being altered to give players a choice between spells with lower throughput and lower cost versus spells with higher throughput and higher costs. Here are some examples from each healer class.

All of this discussion of efficiency may cause most healers to start worrying about mana regeneration and their mana pool. To allay those concerns, we've increased base mana regeneration a great deal at early gear levels, while having it scale up less at later gear levels. This will make all of these changes play well even in early content such as Heroic Dungeons and the first tier of Raid content, and also play well in the final Raid tier without mana and efficiency becoming irrelevant due to extremely high regeneration values. "...we've increased base mana regeneration a great deal at early gear levels, while having it scale up less at later gear levels." That's a lot of big changes for healers: reduced throughput, a more deliberate pace, less powerful “smart” heals, weaker absorbs, fewer spells, and a new focus on efficiency decisions. We're confident that we can apply lessons learned from previous expansions to make this the best healer experience yet: more dynamic, less punishing, and frankly a lot more fun.General Changes to Healing

Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range, instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets.

Every class has multiple area healing spells available, some low throughput and efficient, others high throughput and inefficient.

Area healing spells are tuned to be less efficient than single-target healing spells when they heal 2 or fewer targets, and more efficient when they heal 3 or more targets.

Spells with cooldowns or limitations may have higher efficiency than the no-cooldown equivalents.

All player-cast healing and absorption effects have been increased by approximately 50% in effectiveness. If they heal or absorb a percentage of maximum health, they are instead reduced by 25%. All other noted changes are in terms relative to that. For example, if another noted change is that "Mega Heal now heals for 40% more," that means that Mega Heal now heals for a total of 210% of what it used to, which is relatively 40% higher compared to other heals.

Racial Traits

We want races to have fun and interesting perks, but if those traits are too powerful, players may feel compelled to play a specific race even if it doesn't suit their aesthetic preference. For example, Trolls' Berserking ability was extremely powerful, and their Beast Slaying passive was often irrelevant, but occasionally tremendously powerful compared to other racial passives. On the other end of the spectrum, many races had few or no performance affecting perks. We also needed to replace or update a number of racials that previously granted Hit or Expertise, since those stats have been removed.We decided to bring down the couple high outliers, then establish a fair baseline and bring everyone else up to that. We achieved that by improving old passives, replacing obsolete ones, and occasionally adding new ones where needed. Our goal with these changes is to reach parity amongst races.

Arcane Acuity is a new racial passive ability that increases Critical Strike chance by 1%.

Arcane Torrent now restores 20 Runic Power for Death Knights (up from 15 Runic Power), 1 Holy Power for Paladins, or 3% of mana for Mages, Priests, and Warlocks (up from 2% of Mana]). Other parts of the ability remain unchanged.

Might of the Mountain is a new racial passive ability that increases Critical Strike bonus damage and healing dealt by 2%.

Stoneform now also removes magic and curse effects in addition to poison, disease, and bleed effects, and reduces physical along with reducing damage taken by 10% for 8 seconds (down from all damage taken). It remains unusable while the Dwarf is under the effects of crowd control.

Ability Pruning and Consolidation

Over the years, we've added significantly more new spells and abilities to the game than we've removed. This has led to the complexity of the game increasing steadily over time, to the point we're at now, where players feel like they need dozens of keybinds. There are many niche abilities which could theoretically be useful in some rare case, but usually are not. There are many abilities that we'd be better off not having. We decided that we needed to make a strong push for paring down the number of abilities each class/spec has. That means making some abilities restricted to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that could be merged with others, or with base abilities.However, this doesn't mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay, or "dumb it down.” We still want there to be interesting decisions during combat, and for skill to matter. But, that doesn't require complexity; we can remove some needless complexity and still retain the depth and skill variance.

One type of ability that we focused on is temporary power buffs ("cooldowns"). Removing those also helps achieve one of our other goals, which is to reduce the amount of cooldown stacking in the game. In cases where a class/spec had multiple cooldowns that typically ended up getting used together, often in a single macro, we merged them, or removed some of them.

What abilities and spells got cut is a very, verydifficult question to answer. Every ability is vital to someone, so we don't take this process lightly. We hope that even if we cut your favorite ability, you can see it in the context of our larger goals. It's important to remember that the point of these changes is to increase players' ability to understand the game, not to reduce depth of gameplay. We attempt to prune abilities with the intent to reduce the amount of keybind/macro bloat and merging abilities that served a similar purpose but are otherwise redundant together.

Additional ChangesRevised the levels at which class abilities are learned to provide a smoother leveling experience.

Please see the Classes Section for changes specific to each class.

Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns

Another big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there was simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game. To solve that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament. Here's a summary of the player-cast CC changes:

Removed Silence effects from all Interrupts. Silences still exist, but are never attached to an Interrupt.

Exception: Roots on 'Charge' types of abilities have no DR category, but have a very short duration instead.

All Stuns now share the same DR category. All Incapacitate ("Mesmerize") effects now share the same DR category, and have been merged with the Horror DR category.A list of which Diminishing Returns category each crowd-control ability belongs to can be found in the forum thread titled: Diminishing Returns in Warlords of Draenor.

Removed the ability to make crowd-control spells with cast-times into instant-cast with a cooldown. Removed many crowd-control spells entirely, and increased the cooldowns and restrictions on others.

PvP trinkets now grant immunity to reapplication of an effect from the same spell cast when they break abilities with persistent effects like Solar Beam.

Long fears are now shorter in PvP, to account for the target also needing to run back afterward.

Additionally, we've significantly reduced the number of throughput-increasing cooldowns and procs, in order to further reduce burst damage. Please keep in mind when reading the specifics of the patch notes that some classes may have lost abilities, or had the power of select abilities reduced. These changes were made in the context of the above goals. Other classes have a reduced crowd-control ability overall. We believe that this entire package of changes will make PvP a more enjoyable experience for everyone.

Concussive Barrage has been removed. Entrapment's Root effect now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Root effects.Scatter Shot has been removed.Silencing Shot has been removed.Traps and trap launchers no longer have an arming time and can instantly trigger.Traps can no longer be disarmed. Widow Venom has been removed.Wyvern Sting now has a 1.5 second cast time.

Fists of Fury no longer stuns a target more than once per cast, but now deals 100% increased damage, and always deal full damage to the primary target with additional targets still being affected by the damage split.

Grapple Weapon has been removed.

Ring of Peace no longer Silences or Disarms enemies. It now incapacitates targets in the area for 3 seconds, or until the target takes damage. The ability now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Mesmerize effects.

Movement Speed

Moving quickly has always been a powerful bonus in World of Warcraft; however, the logic of how various movement speed bonuses stack (or don't) has generally been inconsistent and poorly explained. Under the old set-up, each movement speed bonus would become more powerful when combined with another, so we would limit what can stack with what, and prevent certain abilities from being used when another one is already in effect. We decided to change the movement speed system to make it more transparent, with rules about stacking that are easier to understand, and with fewer restrictions.

Previously, multiple movement speed modifiers on you were multiplicative, meaning that if you had two different +25% movement speed bonuses, they resulted in a total movement speed of 56% (1.25*1.25 = 1.56).

Movement speed bonuses have been changed to be additive. The previous example with two different +25% movement speed bonuses would result in a total movement speed of +50%. The logic governing which bonuses stack with others has been simplified as well. "Movement speed bonuses have been changed to be additive."

Movement speed buffs that are self-only or is a passive effect are considered non-exclusive, and will now all stack together additively.

Movement speed buffs that are temporary or could be applied to other players are considered exclusive, their effects do not stack, and only the highest bonus gets applied (in addition to non-exclusive movement speed buffs).

Additionally, restrictions that prevented a player with a temporary speed bonus from receiving or activating a second temporary speed bonus have been removed. Both bonuses will now apply to the character, but only the one with the highest magnitude will have any effect.

All of these effects can now be applied simultaneously, but only the strongest one will have an effect.

Buffs and Debuffs

All specializations provide some common buffs and debuffs. These are important to the game because they encourage cooperation, make you stronger when you work together with others, and promote Raid composition diversity. However, we saw room to revise these buffs and debuffs. In addition to the above changes, we revised which buffs and debuffs are provided by Hunter pets. Please see the Hunter Pet Abilities section for a full list of changes.

Two new stats have been added that benefitted all players. Also added were three new debuffs (Weakened Armor, Physical Vulnerability, and Magic Vulnerability) that each benefitted only half of the group. While that could be interesting, the two physical debuffs were redundant, and felt that the two new stats would be better suited as raid buffs. So, we made that replacement.

The Cast Speed Slow was a debuff type that mattered almost exclusively to PvP, and made combat much less fun for casters in addition to encouraging the use of instant-cast spells. We decided that it was best to remove casting speed debuffs.

Cast Speed Slows

The following abilities no longer slow the target's casting speed by 50%.

Raid Utility Balance

Various classes bring various abilities that provide utility to parties and raids. We talked about one type of utility in the Buffs and Debuffs section, above. However, there are other types of raid utility, and it's been in need of more attention. In general, raid utility, especially raid-wide defensive cooldowns, had grown too strong. So many classes and specializations had defensive cooldowns that we had to make raid damage extremely high, as raids would be stacking or chaining together multiple cooldowns. We'd like to return to a system where it's the healers who heal through the scary moments, not the damage dealers, for example.

To do so, we've established a new baseline level of raid utility that a specialization should bring, and brought everyone to that new standard by reducing the effects of some abilities, or removing some abilities altogether.

Aspect of the Fox is a new ability for all Hunters.Aspect of the Fox: Party and raid members within 40 yards take on the aspects of a fox, allowing them to move while casting all spells for 6 seconds. Only one Aspect can be active at a time. 3 minute cooldown.

Rallying Cry now increases health by 15% (down from 20%), and is no longer available to Protection Warriors.

has been removed.

Instant Cast Heals

Over time, healers have gained a bigger and bigger arsenal of heals that they can cast while on the move, which removes the inherent cost that movement is intended to have for them, while also limiting players' ability to counter healing in PvP. This left Silences and crowd control (which we're trying to curb) as the only ways to actually limit an enemy player's healing output. We're still preserving the option to instantly heal, but are reducing the number of instant-cast healing abilities overall. Raid and dungeon encounter damage during high-movement phases will be adjusted accordingly. Here are some examples:

Periodic Effects

There are many effects in the game which deal periodic damage over time (DoT) or healing over time (HoT). Historically, these have typically done something called “snapshotting”; they were based on your stats at the time that they were cast, and that was used for calculating their effect for their full lifetime. In Mists, if a warlock casts Corruption on an enemy while Heroism is active, that DoT will continue to tick rapidly based on the temporary haste effect, even after Heroism fades. This has led to some gameplay that has both good and bad sides.Snapshotting encourages refreshing those periodic effects when your stats are high, such as when a temporary buff procs. On the upside, there's a high amount of skill involved in maximizing that. On the downside, it's not intuitive, and the skill ceiling is so high that few can reach it without the use of specialized add-ons. To make matters worse, the benefits of maximizing periodic snapshotting is so high that it creates a balance problem. Players maximizing periodic snapshotting (primarily through the use of add-ons) do drastically more damage than intended. If we balance around taking full advantage of snapshotting, then the players who aren't doing so would fall unacceptably far behind in damage output.

Ultimately, we've decided that snapshotting isn't a productive mechanic for the game. The vast majority of periodic effects in the game that snapshotted no longer do so. The only exceptions are ones that do damage based on a percentage of a previous ability's damage (such as the Ignite from a Fire Mage's Fireball, or the periodic damage on a 's Blackout Kick), as they inherently act as a delayed damage multiplier to those abilities. Temporary effects which buff the damage or healing of other spells specifically will continue to do so for their lifetime; for example, Unleash Flame (which increases the damage of the shaman's next fire spell by 40%), when used on a Flame Shock, will continue to increase the damage of the periodic effect for its entire lifetime, despite being consumed when the Flame Shock is cast. "The vast majority of periodic effects in the game that snapshotted no longer do so. The only exceptions are ones that do damage based on a percentage of a previous ability's damage..." We still of course want skills and their use to embody interesting choices, and intelligent and skillful use of abilities.

Periodic damage and healing effects now dynamically recalculate their damage, healing, Critical chance, multipliers, and period on every tick.

Skilled players will still be able to take advantage of temporary power buffs like trinket procs, and you'll still want to cast your hardest hitting spells within those proc durations. The benefits just won't extend outside the trinket procs' duration. As such, this high-skill gameplay is there, it's just rewarded more consistently. For example, a Priest's trinket procs and an already active Shadow Word: Pain will begin dealing more damage the instant the proc effect occurs, but will return to normal when the proc duration ends. Skilled players will be able to play within these proc durations to maximize effect, but it won't be as detrimental to output to anyone who isn't actively and skillfully using them to their full extent.We also made another change to periodic effects. Haste has long affected the tick rate of periodic effects, and their duration has been rounded to whole numbers of ticks, in order to mostly preserve the original duration of the spell. This lead to Haste breakpoints where having specific amounts of Haste would cause certain periodic effects to gain an extra tick. Part of gearing your character involved trying to reach those Haste breakpoints, but not go over by too much. This was a fairly tedious number to manage, which was again mostly handled by add-ons and guides. With some new tech we're now able to calculate the effect of Haste on tick time dynamically. Any fraction of a full period left at the end of an effect will do a tick of damage or healing in proportion to the remaining time. In other words, there are no more Haste breakpoints; Haste now smoothly and accurately affects periodic effects for the entire duration.

"In other words, there are no more Haste breakpoints; Haste now smoothly and accurately affects periodic effects for the entire duration." This also opened up the opportunity to revise how we handle refreshing periodic effects. For the vast majority of spells and abilities, we had a standard rule that any refresh would add the new cast's duration after the next tick of the existing effect. In simpler terms, you can refresh anywhere between the last and second-to-last tick of a DoT or HoT with no loss. Warlocks had a special passive that changed this logic to allow refreshing with no loss anywhere in the last 50% of a DoT. We liked the flexibility that this provided; though felt it was a bit too powerful. No longer tied to whole tick times, we chose to extend the mechanic that Warlocks had to all classes, but reduce it to 30%. Everyone can now refresh their periodic effects anywhere in the last 30% of the duration for full benefit, and no lost tick time.

Recasting periodic damage over time and healing over time effects that are already on the target now extends those effects to up to 130% of the normal duration of the effect.

Tank Vengeance, Resolve, and PvP

The changes to tanking made in Mists of Pandaria turned out quite well, overall. But there were a few rough parts that we're going to smooth over. The biggest one is the offensive capabilities of Vengeance. We like that tanks can provide meaningful DPS to their group, however, it swung wildly based on the fight, even surpassing the dedicated damage dealers occasionally. To solve this, we're going to remove the offensive value of Vengeance, but preserve the defensive value, by making it increase the effect of your active mitigation buttons, instead of Attack Power.

Resolve: Increases your healing and absorption done to yourself, based on Stamina and damage taken (before avoidance and mitigation) in the last 10 seconds. Without Resolve, Tanks now deal significantly less self-healing and absorption. Resolve has been made much stronger to counteract this, and it increases the amount of self-healing and absorption as appropriate for the fight.

Then, to keep tank DPS meaningful, we'll be raising their damage, since it would be meager with no Vengeance Attack Power (Vengeance accounted for 70-90% of a tank's damage on high-tank-damage fights in Mists). To do that, we're increasing the damage of several prominent tank abilities. For plate-wearing Tank specializations, Riposte has been redesigned to convert Critical Strike into Parry, a defensive stat. That also helps keep secondary stats balanced in offensive value for them.

General

Riposte is a passive ability for Blood Death Knights, Protection Paladins, and Protection warriors.

Riposte now gives the character Parry equal to their Critical Strike bonus from gear.

All tanking stances and similar effects now increases threat generated by 900% (up from 600%).

Mastery: Critical Block now also passively increases Attack Power by 8% (percentage increased by Mastery), in addition to its current effects.

Tanks in PvP

Finally, we have the topic of tanks in PvP. Apart from a few niche cases like flag carrying; tanks have been intentionally non-viable in serious PvP for several expansions now. The reason for this was simple: fighting against tanks was very frustrating, not fun. They were near-invincible, had numerous CC abilities (primary stuns), but did little enough damage to not be able to kill you (in most cases, anyway). By excluding them from PvP, we preserved the enjoyment of the rest of the playerbase. However, that has the obvious downside that people who prefer to play tanks are excluded from doing so in PvP.

We decided that we could do better, and satisfy everyone involved. Our other changes to tanks in Warlords of Draenor got us most of the way there. Tanks' damage will already be tuned to be somewhat weaker than damage dealers, but not trivial. We've already removed the additional CC that they had during the CC Disarmament and Ability Pruning. All that remains that makes them frustrating to fight against is their invincibility. So, we're causing tanks to take increased damage in PvP, so that the net result is that they both deal and take somewhat less damage than damage dealers.

Tanks now take 25% additional damage while engaged in PvP combat.

Quality of Life Improvements

Facing Requirements

Strict facing requirements can be frustrating to deal with, especially in hectic Raid combat or PvP environments. In order to ease this frustration, we decided to remove or significantly loosen the facing requirements of all attacks that required the player to be behind their target.

Rogue (Subtlety): Backstab can now be used on either side of the target, in addition to behind the target.

Tooltip Clarity

Being able to quickly understand what an ability does by glancing at the tooltip is of paramount importance to learn how to play with a given class or specialization. We've taken an extensive look at the tooltips for all class abilities, and revised them to be as clear and concise as possible.

In some rare cases, we've removed mention of niche information that we don't think is needed. If that's the case, please note that a change to the ability's tooltip does not mean that functionality has changed. If the change in question is not mentioned in the Patch Notes, there has been no change to the ability.

Tooltips for nearly all class abilities have been revised for increased clarity.

Self-Sustainability

Another area of gameplay that we polished is how characters are able to sustain their own health, primarily when frequently killing enemies, such as in solo questing.

Reforging

The original intent behind Reforging was to offer a way for players to customize their gear, but in practice it offered little in the way of true choice. Players attempting to optimize every piece of gear were well advised to look up how they were supposed to reforge an item in an online guide or tool that had already determined the optimal choice. It added yet another step to the list of things that must be done to a new item before it was ready to be equipped, reducing the joy of getting an upgrade into a chore.

If an upgrade drops, we want you to be able to equip it with a minimum of fuss. It is for those reasons that we're removing Reforging from the game.

The Reforging system and associated NPCs have been removed from the game.

All existing items that were reforged have been returned to their original un-reforged state.

Combat Resurrections

Combat resurrections are an extremely powerful tool that players have while in combat. Naturally, we apply some limitations. In Mists of Pandaria, that limit was 1 resurrection during a given raid boss encounter for 10-player modes and 3 for 25-player modes. With Flexible difficulty introduced in Patch 5.4, we erred on the forgiving side, and gave Flexible Raids 3 resurrections regardless of raid size.

In Warlords of Draenor, the Flex tech has expanded to more difficulty levels, and we needed a new system to handle combat resurrections more fairly. We knew that continuing with a constant 3 would encourage using the smallest possible raid sizes, while scaling with hard breakpoints would discourage specific group sizes just under those points. Additionally, the limit is not shown anywhere in-game, so it can be easy to lose track of how many resurrections the raid has available (or even know that the limit exists).

So we've built a new system to be more transparent, and improve usability.

During a boss encounter, all combat resurrection spells now share a single raid-wide pool of charges that's visible on the action bar button.

Upon engaging a boss, all combat resurrection spells will have their cooldowns reset and begin with 1 charge. Charges will accumulate at a rate of 1 per (90/RaidSize) minutes.

A charge will only be deducted when a combat resurrection is successful (when the target accepts the resurrection). Raid frames now show a debuff indicating that a dead player has a pending combat resurrection available. Outside of raid boss encounters, combat resurrection spells retain their normal cooldown behavior.

Resurrection Mana Costs (Section Removed)

Notes for resurrection Mana cost changes were moved to the relevant class sections.

Glyphs

We made several improvements to the Glyph system. While leveling, characters unlock Glyph slots at several specific levels. However, in order to get glyphs, characters need to visit an Auction House (and potentially pay way more gold than an average character of that level has yet), or know a Scribe from which to request them. To solve this, we've made characters learn some Glyphs automatically as they level. Additionally, we now have the ability to make some glyphs exclusive with each other, or require specific specializations.

Many glyphs have been removed, and many new glyphs have been added.

Exclusive categories have been added for some glyphs. Other glyphs from the same category cannot be applied at the same time.

Some glyphs are now exclusive to a specialization.

All classes now learn some of their Major Glyphs as they level. Recipes for these Glyphs have been removed.

At level 25, Glyph of the following Glyphs are automatically learned by characters of the appropriate class:

Professions

Some of our goals with Professions in Warlords of Draenor are to make them more of a personal choice, and less of a mandatory “min/max” selection. To that end, we're removing the direct combat benefits of Professions. Additionally, we've made it easier to level Mining and Herbalism. Healing Potions have gone mostly unused lately, compared to combat stat potions. We chose to solve that problem, along with a problem with Warlock utility, by having Healing Potions and Healthstones share cooldowns.

Herbalists can now harvest herbs throughout the game world without hard skill requirements. The yield an Herbalist will be able to harvest from each node is now determined by skill level.

s can now harvest mineral nodes in outdoor areas of the game world without hard skill requirements. The yield a will be able to harvest from each node is now determined by skill level.

Healing Potions no longer share a cooldown with other potions, but instead share a 60-second cooldown with Healthstones. The cooldown will not reset until the player leaves combat.

A number of changes were made for Death Knights. Several cooldowns were made spec-specific. Frost and Unholy's rotations remain unchanged for the most part. Blood received revisions to their Active Mitigation design to bring them up to par with changes to other Tanking specializations. Runic Power generation of Anti-Magic Shell was standardized, to make it more understandable and balanced.

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section above for a discussion of why we're pruning class abilities. For Death Knights, this focused on removing abilities that were redundant, cooldown reduction, or abilities that were not used often.

Raise Dead is now only available to Unholy Death Knights, has a 1-minute cooldown (down from 2 minutes), and the summoned ghoul is now a permanent pet.

Rune of Cinderglacier has been removed.

Rune of the Nerubian Carapace has been removed.

Unholy Frenzy has been removed.

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

The biggest change here is the merger of Blood Boil into Blood Boil. This change effectively turned Roiling Blood into a passive ability; which we replaced with a new talent, Plaguebearer. For Blood specialization, we removed Rune Strike and are adjusting the cost of Death Coil so that it can be used in Rune Strike's place.

Another change was to polish up the effect of diseases on the damage of other abilities. Diseases now do enough damage on their own to warrant using them. Having diseases act as multipliers on the damage of other abilities became extraneous and cluttered up the tooltips of those abilities. Those multipliers have been removed, and consolidated their benefits into the corresponding base spell. These changes also results in a slight reduction to ramp-up time.

Horn of Winter no longer generates Runic Power, has no cooldown, and lasts 1 hour.

Blood Boil now deals 50% more damage to all enemies within 10 yards, and spreads any diseases on targets hit to all other targets hit, but no longer deals additional damage for additional diseases being present on the target.

Army of the Dead now deals 75% less damage.Master of Ghouls has been removed and its effects have been merged into the baseline Raise Dead ability for Unholy Death Knights.Threat of Thassarian has been removed and its effects have been merged into Might of the Frozen Wastes.Rune Strike has been removed. Blood Death Knights should now use Death Coil in its place.Dancing Rune Weapon now lasts 8 seconds (down from 12 seconds).Death Coil now costs 30 Runic Power (down from 40 Runic Power) and has a 40 yard range for both hostiles and allies.

Pillar of Frost now increases Strength by 15% (down from 20%).Obliterate now deals 25% more damage on both main and off-hand weapons, but no longer deals additional damage for each disease present on the target.

Rune of the Fallen Crusader now increases Strength by 20% (up from 15%).Scourge Strike no longer deals additional damage for each disease present on the target. The ability now deals 100% Physical weapon damage, and 50% Shadow weapon damage. These two effects can independently critically hit.

Vampiric Blood now increases the amount of healing received by 15% (down from 25%).

Glyph of Vampiric Blood now increases the amount of healing received by an additional 10% (down from 15%).

Frost Changes

In Mists of Pandaria, Frost Death Knights suffered from rotations that were designed to allow flexibility in ability usage, so that you could pool some resources in order to make decisions about which ones you spent and in which order. Dual Wield vs Two-Handed had different rotational priorities, with different strengths and weaknesses. However, tuning ended up such that you reached a point where you just had to spend all of your resources as fast as possible to avoid wasting any, and all of that depth went out the window. For Warlords, we've adjusted the tuning of several abilities and passives, to ensure that that doesn't happen again, and the rotational decisions and skill are maintained.

The goal is that Two-Handed Frost Death Knights favor their physical damage, slicing through their enemies with heavy Obliterates, whereas Dual-Wielders favor blasting their foes with frost damage, but both overlap considerably to maintain a cohesive specialization.

Frost Strike's damage has been increased by 100%, but its Runic Power cost has been increased by 5 (up to 25 Runic Power in Frost Presence, and 40 Runic Power in other Presences).

Icy Talons now increases attack speed by 20% (down from 45%), and haste by 5% (up from 0%).

Might of the Frozen Wastes now increases the damage of Obliterate by 50% (up from 40%) and melee damage by 35% (up from 30%) while wielding a two-handed weapon, and increases the damage of Frost Strike by 50% (up from 35%) while dual-wielding.

Unholy Changes

In order to better balance the scaling rates and value of secondary stats for Unholy Death Knights, we reduced the power of their passive Unholy Might ability, and added a new passive ability to make Multistrike more effective.

Blood Changes

Active Mitigation was a very successful design that was inspired by Death Knights' tanking style. However, it went beyond that, and Death Knights themselves were somewhat left behind in that regard. We made several changes to bring up the interactivity of Blood combat. This includes making Death Strike cause healing based on attack power, but be affected by the new Resolve passive (see Tank Vengeance and Resolve above), which gives it the traditional increase from recent damage. Plus, Rune Tap is being significantly improved, to become a strong Active Mitigation button.

Additionally, we removed Dodge and Parry from gear, and expect Blood Death Knights to value Haste and Crit as important secondary stats. In order to achieve that, we made Riposte give defensive value to Critical Strikes, and Scent of Blood give defensive value to Multistrike. To solve GCD-capping issues and increase the value of Haste, we also removed the passive rune regeneration increase from Improved Blood Presence. Finally,we tweaked the targeting AI of Dancing Rune Weapon, and fixed it up to properly copy most Talents that you know.

Rune Tap has been redesigned. It now reduces all damage taken by 40% 50% for 3 seconds. It also now has 2 charges, with a 40-second recharge time.

Will of the Necropolis has been redesigned. It now automatically triggers an immediate, free Rune Tap when you take damage that reduces you below 30% health. This effect cannot occur more often than once every 30 seconds.

Glyph of Rune Tap has been redesigned. It now reduces Rune Tap’s recharge time by 10 seconds, but reduces the damage reduction it provides by 20%.

Scarlet Fever has been removed. Its effects have been merged into Scent of Blood.

Veteran of the Third War now increases your Multistrike chance, haste, and Stamina by 10% (up from 9% to Stamina only), reduces the chance for attacks to be parried by 3%, and increases the damage of Death Strike by 100% and grants 1 Runic Power per second while in combat..

Since the Ghoul pet is now Unholy only, that presents a problem for Death Pact. We revised Death Pact to not require an undead minion, but work a little differently. We left it at 50% heal, which is effectively a 33% buff to it from before (see Retuning Healing Spells and Player Health and Resilience above), and added a healing absorption shield for 50% of the amount healed instead. It should now be a more effective heal for staying alive immediately, but with the downside of needing to heal through the healing absorption shield before being healed any further.

Death Pact no longer requires an undead minion, and instead places a healing absorption shield on the Death Knight for 50% of the amount healed.

Miscellaneous

There were also a few other miscellaneous changes. The Runic Power generation of Anti-Magic Shell was standardized, to make it more understandable and balanced. Level-60 and Level-75 talent rows have swapped places, so the important rune regeneration talents could be acquired earlier. Conversion was changed to cost different amounts by specialization, instead of reducing Runic Power generation differently by specialization. This way, Runic Power beyond what you spend on Conversion is not penalized.

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section above for discussion of why we're pruning class abilities. For Druids, we focused thinning out the niche and abilities that were not used often. We made sure to retain abilities for Druids to function in off-spec roles, since that flexibility is a defining characteristic of the class.

Barkskin is now available to Balance, Guardian, and Restoration Druids,

Mana regeneration for Feral and Guardian Druids have been increased by 100%.

Mangle (Cat Form) has been removed.Maul is now available only to Guardian Druids.Might of Ursoc has been removed. no longer automatically activates Bear Form and is now available only to Guardian Druids.Nature's Swiftness is now available only to s.Nourish has been removed.Owlkin Frenzy has been removed.Rake now also stuns the target for 4 seconds if used while stealthed, and is only available to s.

Survival Instincts is now available only to Feral and Guardian Druids.Swipe is now requires the Druid to be in Cat Form and is available only to s.Symbiosis has been removed.Thrash is now available to all Druid specializations (was Feral and Guardian only).

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

For consolidation of abilities, we merged several passive abilities. One notable change is the merging of Ravage into Shred, and Pounce into Rake; saving a couple keybinds that were only used in conjunction with Prowl. The loss of Symbiosis primarily impacted Druid survivability, as many of the abilities received through Symbiosis were defensive cooldowns. To compensate for that, we improved Barkskin (for non-s) and Survival Instincts (for Feral and Guardian Druids).

Rake now also stuns the target for 4 seconds if used while stealthed, and is only available to s.

Pounce has been removed and its effects have been incorporated into Rake.

Regrowth now has a duration of 12 seconds (up from 6 seconds), but no longer refreshes its duration on targets at or below 50% health.Revive's mana cost has been reduced by 87%.Rip now has a duration of 24 seconds (up from 16 seconds), but its duration is no longer extended by Shred, and is only available to s.Shred no longer requires the Druid to be behind the target (See also:Facing Requirements.) and is now available to all specializations. Shred now deals 35% more damage in addition to having double the normal chance to critically strike while stealthed.

Ravage has been removed and its effects have been incorporated into Shred.

Skull Bash no longer increases the mana cost of the victim's spells.Starfall no longer cancels when mounting. However, it can no longer hit stealthed or invisible targets.

Survival Instincts no longer requires or forces the Druid into Cat or Bear Form, and now lasts 6 seconds (down from 12 seconds) reduces damage taken by 70% (up from 50%) with a 2-minute cooldown (down from 3 minutes), and can have up to 2 charges (up from 1 charge).Thick Hide has been removed and its effects has been incorporated into Bear Form.

Bear Form now increases armor by 180% 330% for all Druid specializations (down from 330% for Guardian Druids, but up from 120% for non-Guardian Druids), and no longer increases Haste and Critical Strike from items by 50%, but instead causes Haste to reduce the global cooldown increases Stamina by 20% (down from 40%), and reduces magic damage taken by 10% (down from 25%).

For Guardian Druids, Bear Form now also reduces magical damage taken by 25%, reduces chance to be critically hit by 6%, and reduces chance for attacks to be parried by 3%.

Guardian Changes

Guardian Druids had increased Armor as their Mastery for a while now. However, one of the new secondary stats available to all tanks is Bonus Armor. We didn't feel that the difference of being additive vs. being a multiplier was significant enough to warrant keeping their Mastery around. Additionally, active mitigation hasn't played out as well for Guardians as it has for some other tanks.

We decided to redesign the Mastery for Guardian Druids to something that compliments the Avoidance-heavy nature of Savage Defense, and also to improve the usability of Tooth and Claw for more consistent damage reduction. Note that Primal Tenacity's calculation uses the damage before any other absorbs you have, and before Tooth and Claw's effects, so that it isn't negatively affected by any of the changes.

The maximum number of charges that can be accumulated for Savage Defense has been reduced to make its uptime more consistent between short and long periods of tanking. Rage for Guardian Druids has been problematic throughout Mists of Pandaria. Most of their rage generation was extremely passive, and most of their button presses either didn't affect their survivability, or only trivially did so. We made changes to Haste and Critical Strike, to try to solve these rage generation problems, and improve their rotation. We also added Ursa Major, in order to give a defensive value to the new Multistrike stat.

Ursa Major causes Multistrikes from auto attacks, Lacerate periodic damage, and Mangle to grant the Druid the Ursa Major effect. Ursa Major increases maximum health by 2% for 25 30 seconds. When the effect is refreshed, the remaining portion is added to the new effect.

Auto-attacks now generate 5 Rage (down from 10.9 Rage).Bear Form no longer increases Haste and Critical Strike from items by 50%, but instead causes Haste to reduce the global cooldown.Faerie Fire no longer has a chance to reset Mangle's cooldown.Maul now costs 20 Rage (down from 30 Rage).Mangle now generates 10 Rage (down from 15 Rage).Lacerate now generates 2 Rage, has no cooldown (down from a 3-second cooldown), and the periodic bleed effect triggers every 1 second (down from 3 seconds).Primal Fury now generates 5 Rage (down from 15 Rage) when you dodge or non-periodically critically strike (up from only Auto Attacks and Mangle).Savage Defense can now accumulate 2 charges (down from 3 charges), and regenerates a charge every 12 seconds (up from 9 seconds).Soul of the Forest (Guardian) now increases Mangle’s Rage generation by 5 (down from 10).

Thrash now generates 1 Rage every time it deals direct or periodic damage, has no cooldown (down from a6-second cooldown), but no longer has a chance to reset Mangle's cooldown.Tooth and Claw can now accumulate 2 charges, its effects stack on the target, and are affected by Resolve.

Feral Changes

s received one major change, and few tweaks beyond what's been mentioned above in Ability Pruning and Facing Requirements. Combo Points are now stored "on the player", meaning that when you switch targets, any accumulated Combo Points remain with you. Primal Fury was changed to let it affect area attacks as well. Critical strike chance of Ferocious Bite was changed in order to increase the value of Critical Strike. Glyph of Savage Roar was reworked to better achieve its intended effect.

Combo Points for s are now shared across all targets, and are no longer lost when switching targets.

Ferocious Bite now has double the normal chance to critically strike against bleeding targets (instead of having an additional 25% chance to critically strike).

Primal Fury now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Druid's primary target.

Glyph of Savagery has been renamed Glyph of Savage Roar, and now grants a free 5 Combo Point Savage Roar when leaving Prowl, instead of allowing Savage Roar to be used with 0 Combo Points.

Balance Rebalanced

We have some extensive changes for s. One of our guiding principles with game design is that things should be "easy to learn, hard to master". We're not particularly happy with the rotation because it was actually hard to learn, and easy to master (especially with regards to periodic damage effects no longer snapshotting). Energy and Eclipse mechanics were not intuitive for many newer players. Once you became accustomed to the rotation, there wasn't much additional depth to mastering it; maintain two DoTs, hit these other two buttons whenever they light up, and spam one of two buttons in between. In order to try to make it easier to learn, but also add some gameplay depth and challenge we're making a significant revision to the rotation. The list of changes is quite dense, so here's a summary of the changes.

Summary of changes to Balance:

Balance Energy is a bar that automatically cycles back and forth between Lunar and Solar sides, like night and day. The closer to one end that the bar is, the more damage that side's spells do.

That's the basics of the new rotation. There's room for improvement beyond that, learning to optimally maintain both periodic damage effects with the strongest Eclipse effect, while maximizing their damage, timing Starsurges to optimize the benefit of its buff, make use of Starfall and Hurricane for area damage, and taking advantage of the strengths of each side (such as Moonfire and Sunfire having significant differences now). Here are the full details of the changes.

Details of changes to Balance:

Balance Energy system has been redesigned. Balance Energy is a bar that cycles back and forth between Lunar and Solar sides, like night and day, with a 40 second cycle time (from Lunar to Solar and back to Lunar).

Balance Energy is no longer generated through spells, talents, or other effects anymore.

Eclipse inspires the Druid with the power of the moon and the sun, causing the damage of Lunar and Solar spells to be increased by up to 30% based on how close Balance Energy levels are to the appropriate side.

Example: With 0 Balance Energy, the damage bonus is evenly split between Lunar and Solar, and the Druid receives a 15% increase to damage for both spell types. With 80 Solar Energy, the Druid receives a 27% damage increase to Solar spells and a 3% damage increase to Lunar spells.

Mastery: Total Eclipse now increases the maximum damage bonus of Eclipse by 12% (increasing with Mastery).The damage of damage-over-time effects changes dynamically as Eclipse changes.

Sunfire's periodic damage effect is now applied to all enemies within 5 yards of the target.

Moonfire now has a base duration of 20 seconds (up from 14 seconds), but is no longer extended by Starfire and Starsurge critical strikes. Upon reaching 100 Lunar Energy, the next Moonfire deals 100% additional initial damage.Shooting Stars now adds 1 full charge of Starsurge and Starfall when it triggers, and now has a 5% chance to trigger when the most recent Moonfire or Sunfire deals periodic damage. This chance is doubled on critical strikes.Soul of the Forest (Balance) has been redesigned.

Soul of the Forest (Balance) now increases the damage bonus from Lunar and Solar Empowerment by an additional 15%.

Starfall now shares charges with Starsurge, and has no cooldown of its own. It also now hits all nearby enemies (up from 2 nearby enemies).Starfire now has a 3 second cast time (up from 2.7 seconds).Starsurge now has 3 charges and a 30 second recharge time (instead of a 15 second cooldown). Starsurge now also grants Lunar or Solar Empowerment.

Sunfire is no longer its own spell and replaces Moonfire on the action bar whenever Balance Energy is on the Solar side. Sunfire now has a base duration of 24 seconds (up from 14 seconds), but is no longer extended by Wrath and Starsurge critical strikes. Enemies may still suffer from both Moonfire and Sunfire's periodic damage components simultaneously. Upon reaching 100 Solar Energy, the next Sunfire deals 100% additional initial damage.Wild Mushroom (Balance) now begins snaring enemies immediately when summoned, lasts 20 seconds, and can no longer be detonated to deal damage.

Tranquility Simplification

Tranquility has an amazingly strong effect (pour a ton of healing into the whole Raid/Party), but had excessive complexity for a relatively simple task (5 different targets per tick, a short HoT, stacking, varied strength by raid size). So, we simplified it significantly. It still will be used just as it always has been.

Tranquility is now only available to s. Tranquility now heals every Party and Raid member within range every 2 seconds for 8 seconds. It no longer places a periodic effect on each target. The total amount of healing it generates in Raids should be approximately the same as before this change.

Restoration Changes

s got a few changes as well. In Patch 5.4, a glyph was introduced where you could choose to attach your Efflorescence to Wild Mushroom, instead of to Swiftmend. That was a rousing success and the glyph was taken by nearly all s. It felt like a much better situation to us so we decided to remove the glyph, and bake that gameplay in permanently. Genesis and Wild Mushroom: Bloom fill a similar need for burst healing, so Wild Mushroom: Bloom has been removed; leaving Wild Mushroom to focus on the Efflorescence effect.

Secondly, while we are fine with the playstyle where a blankets their Raid in Rejuvenations, the Swift Rejuvenation passive made that too strong, and limited their scaling with Haste. We removed that passive to encourage using other spells more, but still allow Rejuvenation blanketing as a viable playstyle. Omen of Clarity got changed to not trigger more often with Tree of Life as it was too strong in our new healing model. Soul of the Forest was also redesigned to fit better with Restoration and Genesis based on the new design for periodic effects.

Genesis now consumes all of the Druid's Rejuvenation effects on party or raid members within 60 yards and applies the Genesis effect to them instead. Genesis heals the target for an amount equal to the remaining healing from the consumed Rejuvenation effects over 3 seconds.

Swift Rejuvenation has been removed.Wild Mushroom (Restoration) now has a 30-second cooldown, lasts for 30 seconds, provides periodic healing to nearby allies, and no longer collects Rejuvenation overhealing.

Talents

The level 90-Talent row for Druids was designed to encourage hybrid gameplay. We decided that, while you shouldn't have to give up a significant amount of your primary role throughput in order to gain the off-role benefit, you also don't need to gain an actual benefit to your primary role throughput benefit either. We've reduced the power of their primary role benefit, making them roughly neutral in their effect on your primary role. Note that the increase to off-role healing from Nature's Vigil is not actually a buff (see Retuning Healing Spells and Player Health and Resilience above).

Heart of the Wild no longer provides an increase to Hit, Expertise, Stamina, Agility, and Intellect while active.Nature's Vigil, while active, increases single-target damage and healing caused by healing spells by 30% (up from 25%), and all single-target damage spells also heal a nearby friendly target for 40% of the damage done (up from 25%). Its healing now targets allies within 40 yards of the Druid (instead of within 40 yards of the target).

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section above for discussion of why we're pruning or consolidating class abilities.

Hunters have lacked a strong distinction between the different specializations. What we mean by that is that the Hunter specializations all had rotations that felt similar, with Marksmanship and Survival having the most blurred identities (Beast Mastery felt well rooted in the pet). Hunters were also some of the most afflicted by button bloat. To address these problems, we opted to make changes to each specialization's rotation, primarily through removing abilities, and making some of them unique to each spec. This means things like Aimed Shot being the primary Focus dump for Marksmanship, instead of Arcane Shot or Serpent Sting being available only to Survival. Hunters also had a large number of cooldown abilities, which we've also cut down (some of which we moved to the talent tree, competing with other active buttons).

Arcane Shot is no longer available to Marksmanship Hunters. The talent Thrill of the Hunt received a change to preserve its value to Marksmanship Hunters.

Steady Focus has been removed.Rabid has been removed as a pet ability.Rapid Fire is now available only to Marksmanship Hunters.Improved Serpent Sting has been removed and its effects have been incorporated into a redesigned Serpent Sting.Viper Venom has been removed and its effects have been incorporated into a redesigned Serpent Sting.Serpent Sting has been redesigned based on Serpent Spread and is now available only to Survival Hunters.

Thrill of the Hunt now has a 6% chance to trigger for every 10 Focus spent (instead of a flat 30% chance).

Rotation Depth and Talents

We've changed the combat rotations of each Hunter specialization (primarily through Ability Pruning) with the goal of them being a platform to build upon with talents. To facilitate this, we've modified several talents to add additional rotational depth. Hunters had many talent options which added abilities to their rotation, but most of them had quite simple usage, with little interaction with your rotation or other abilities. Now, there should be more of a variety; still some simple talents, but also some talents that create a more engaging combat rotation.

Barrage now has a 20 second cooldown (down from 30 seconds), costs 60 Focus (up from 30 Focus), and its damage has been increased by 100%.

Murder of Crows has been changed. Its duration, cost, and cooldown have been reduced by 50%. It no longer has a shorter cooldown when used on low health targets. Instead, its cooldown is reset if the target dies.

Fervor has been replaced with a new passive ability, Steady Focus. Steady Focus increases Focus Regeneration by 50% for 10 seconds after using Cobra Shot or Steady Shot twice in a row, or after using Focusing Shot.

Aspects

One of the most difficult abilities to decide to cut was Aspect of the Hawk. It began to feel fairly meaningless, since it was used virtually all of the time in combat, so might as well have just been passive. We decided to cut Aspect of the Hawk, and bake in its benefit to the other abilities. The remaining aspect abilities are all utility only, and are being moved off the stance bar and made toggles.

Overall, Hunters should see a drastic reduction in the number of active buttons, and have a clearerdistinction between the different specializations. With some of these changes, you may find yourself favoring a different specialization.Keep in mind that Draenor Perks, earned from levels 91 to 99, will serve to further distinguish the different specializations.

Marksmanship Changes

One of our new secondary stats Multistrike, is strikingly similar to the Wild Quiver Mastery for Marksmanship Hunters. To address this similarity, we replaced Wild Quiver with a new Mastery: Sniper Training. Marksmanship Hunters that favored Mastery before will want to favor Multistrike for a similar feel. For their new Mastery, we wanted to add some depth to their moment-to-moment gameplay, and compliment Critical Strike. In order to do that, we brought back the concept of Sniper Training.

We also changed the design of Chimera Shot (and fixed its name), in order to better capture the intended flavor. Finally, we added an interaction between Careful Aim and Rapid Fire (and indirectly Aimed Shot through a Draenor Perk), so as to add a bit more depth to their gameplay.

Bombardment now reduces the cost of Multi-Shot by 25 Focus (up from 20 Focus).

Mastery: Wild Quiver has been removed.

Sniper Training is a new Mastery for Marksmanship Hunters, replacing Wild Quiver.

Sniper Training activates when the Hunter stands still for 3 seconds, giving them the Sniper Training effect for 6 seconds, increasing damage, shot range, and critical strike damage by 4% (increased by Mastery).

Chimera Shot has been renamed Chimaera Shot. It is now a two-headed shot that hits two targets, costs 35 Focus (down from 45 Focus) and deals Frost or Nature damage. It no longer heals the Hunter.Careful Aim now also provides its effect against all targets when Rapid Fire is active, and increases critical strike chance by 60% (down from 75%).

Survival Changes

Apart from rotational changes through Ability Pruning, changes for Survival Hunters mostly center on . We changed how is triggered to increase the value of Multistrike, provide gameplay depth and the ability to pool damage more. Also note the new passive ability, Survivalist, which increases multistrike chance by 10%, in order to give Survival Hunters some baseline Multistrike chance.

Survivalist is a new passive ability learned by Survival Hunters at level 10.Survivalist increases Multistrike damage by 20% and causes the Hunter to gain 15% health over 10 seconds after killing a target.

Hunter Pet Abilities

We did a comprehensive pass on Hunter pet abilities. As mentioned above in Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns, all full crowd-control abilities have been removed from Hunter pets and replaced those with new abilities, including spreading some that were previously restricted to exotic pets. Additionally, Hunters can now tame beasts from new pet families.

Several raid buffs provided by Hunter Pets have been changed into auras that are automatically applied to the Hunter's party or raid.Abilities unique to each hunter pet family has been revised to provide a standard buff, debuff, or ability.

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section for discussion of why we're pruning class abilities. For Mages, we removed several of the unused and niche abilities from each specialization that didn't use them primarily.

Mage Armor is now a passive effect and is available only to Arcane Mages.

Frost Armor is now a passive effect and is available only to Frost Mages.

Molten Armor is now a passive effect and is available only to Fire Mages.

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

Most of the Mage abilities required little consolidation. The most notable change here is turning Armor spells into passive abilities for each specialization.

Mage Armor is now a passive effect and is available only to Arcane Mages.

Frost Armor is now a passive effect and is available only to Frost Mages.

Molten Armor is now a passive effect and is available only to Fire Mages.

Combustion's damage has been increased by 100%, but no longer deals direct damage or stuns, and replaces Deep Freeze for Fire Mages.

can no longer be used to heal the Mage's Water Elemental.

Ice Floes no longer has a restriction on base cast or channel times for spells (formerly only worked on spells with a base cast or channel time of less than 4 seconds).

Ignite now deals the same total damage with a 1 second period (down from 2 seconds). Base duration changed to 5 seconds so that duration when refreshed remains 6 seconds.

Mirror Image is now a level-90 Talent, replacing Invocation. Mirror Images now inherit 50% of the Mage's Spell Power (up from 5%).

Polymorph variants except for Polymorph: are now all learned as spells andgrouped in a flyout on the Spellbook instead of being a Minor Glyph that alters the visuals of Polymorph: .

Talent Revisions

The Mage class has good specialization distinction when it comes to their single-target rotations, but utility and area-of-effect spells were heavily shared between specializations. Commonly, these spells were redundant as well. We made many of their spells specialization-specific (as described in Ability Pruning above). And probably most significant, we made changes to several existing Talents.

Presence of Mind was extremely strong for instant crowd control (CC), which we wanted to curtail. Rather than completely remove Presence of Mind or make it not affect CC abilities, we made it a base Arcane spell, where we don't expect that it will be a problem, since Arcane has less CC than the other Mage specs already. In its place, we've added a new talent, Evanesce. It may seem out of place on a movement-focused talent row at first. In practice, we expect that the similarity will bear out as Mages use it instead of moving away from avoidable damage.

Presence of Mind is no longer a talent, and is now learned by only Arcane Mages..

Evanesce is a new Talent available at level 15, replacing Presence of Mind.

Evanesce causes the Mage to fade into the nether, avoiding all attacks for 3 seconds. This spell has a 45-second cooldown, replaces Ice Block, is not on global cooldown, and may be cast while a cast-time spell is in progress.

Going along with our goals to reduce cooldown stacking across all of the classes, we decided to remove Alter Time's DPS contribution. Alter Time has a number of clever movement and utility uses, but in practice it was mostly being used for additional uptime of offensive cooldowns. Mages also had many redundant forms of survival utility, so we moved a utility-only version of Alter Time into the Talent tree, replacing Temporal Shield.

Ice Ward was changed to make it more competitive with the rest of its talent row.Ice Ward now causes the next 3 attackers (up from 1) to trigger a Frost Nova.

The Mage Bomb level-75 Talent row, the Bomb row, was also problematic. We chose to add the Bombs to all Mages' rotations in order to spice them up a bit, to provide rotational variety. That succeeded, and we're overall happy with how they interact with your rotation in a single-target situation, but they also came with the prospect of multi-dotting (applying your damage-over-time spell to many enemies, individually), which we don't feel is an appropriate fit for Mages. Additionally, in order to make all 3 Bombs useful to all specializations, we had to lose some of their spec-specific perks. And, even more importantly, many Mages did not like DoT gameplay at all.

In order to solve all of these problems, we decided to merge the 3 current Bomb Talents into one that changes based on spec. That allows us to reintroduce spec-specific perks to each Bomb, and makes room for some non-DoT alternatives.

Frost Bomb now lasts 12 seconds, has no cooldown, and explodes every time the target is hit by the Mage's Ice Lance while frozen. The damage per explosion has been reduced by 75% to compensate.

Living Bomb can once again be applied to multiple targets, can be spread by Inferno Blast, and has a 1.5-second cooldown. More of its damage has been moved into its explosion.Nether Tempestcan now only be on 1 target at a time (down from unlimited), but its secondary damage now hits all targets in range (up from only 1), deals 100% of the primary damage (up from 50%), and its damage can now be increased by Arcane Charges.

Unstable Magic is a new Talent that's available at level 75, and occupies the middle-talent slot.

Unstable Magic causes Arcane Blast, Fireball, and have a chance to explode on impact, dealing an additional 50% damage to the target, and all other enemies within 8 yards.

The right-talent slot for level-75 has a new Talent that varies by specialization.

Blast Wave: Cause an explosion of fiery force around the target enemy or ally, dealing Fire damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and dazing them, reducing their movement speed by 70% for 4 seconds. If the primarytarget is an enemy, they take 100% increased damage. Replaces Frost Nova. Instant cast ability with a 25-second cooldown and 2 charges.

Ice Nova: Cause a whirl of icy wind around the target enemy or ally, dealing Frost damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and freezing them for 4 seconds. If the primarytarget is an enemy, they take 100% increased damage. Replaces Frost Nova. Instant cast ability with a 20-second cooldown and 2 charges.

Supernova: Cause a pulse of Arcane energy around the target enemy or ally, dealing Arcane damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and knocking them into the air. If the primary target is an enemy, they take 100% increased damage. Replaces Frost Nova. Instant cast ability with a 25-second cooldown and 2 charges.

One of the most problematic Talent rows in the game has been the Mage level-90 row. The primary theme of the row was mana, which only Arcane Mages actually cared about. Bonus damage was added in, making it functional for all Mages, but muddled in its goals. Additionally, some of them just weren't fun to play with. We've revised the row to be purely about damage, and made them have less maintenance cost. Arcane Mages will have enough mana regeneration without these Talents to perform well.

Incanter's Ward has been removed and replaced by Incanter's Flow a new level-90 Talent.

Incanter's Flow: Magical energy flows through you, increasing all spell damage done by 5% per stack. While in combat, the magical energy builds up to 5 stacks over 5 seconds and then diminishes down to 1 stack over 5 seconds. This cycle repeats every 10 seconds.

Invocation has been removed and replaced by Mirror Image.Mirror Image is now a level-90 Talent, replacing Invocation. Mirror Images now inherit 100% of the Mage's Spell Power (up from 5%) last 40 seconds (up from 30 seconds), and have a 2 minutes cooldown (down from 3 minutes)..

Glyph of Mirror Image has been removed and its effects have been incorporated into Mirror Image.

Rune of Power no longer replaces Evocation, no longer increases mana regeneration, and now lasts 3 minutes (up from 1 minute).

Frost Changes

Frost Mages enjoyed newfound PvE viability in Mists of Pandaria, and we intend to continue that into the future. However, we do want to clean up some rough spots, especially around their valuing of secondary stats, and the amount of instant-cast spells in their rotation. The Frost Armor and Shatter changes increase the amount of Haste/Critical chance that they can acquire on gear before they start hitting soft caps. The Shatter change also lowers the value of Critical Strike for a bit. The changes to the level-75 Talent row meant that having a Bomb spell is no longer guaranteed, so we changed the way that Brain Freeze is triggered. Ice Lance's non-frozen damage was doubled to make up for no longer having access to Fire Blast and reducing redundancy in the process.

Frost Armor now grants an 8% chance to Multistrike instead of 7% Haste.

The Brain Freeze effect now increases Frostfire Bolt's damage by 25%, and can now stack up to 2 times. It alsono longer triggers from the Bomb Talents, and instead has a 10% chance to trigger from casts. Each Multistrike of Frostbolt increases that cast's chance by an additional 25%. (Total of 60% on double-Multistrikes).

Ice Lance's base damage has been increased by 100%, but its damage multiplier against frozen targets has been reduced by 50%.

The brand-new class for Mists of Pandaria, Monks, turned out to be a ton of fun. Brewmasters stayed fairly solid all expansion long. Windwalkers needed a few tweaks here and there, especially to their Mastery, and still have a few shortcomings that we hope to improve, but overall worked quite well. Mistweavers had a bit of a rollercoaster ride, veering between weak and strong over the course of the expansion. Most of our changes to Monks will focus on Mistweavers, to try to get them just right.

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section above for discussion of why we're pruning class abilities. For Monks, the pruning focused on niche abilities. One removal of note is that of Healing Sphere. The active ability to place a Healing Sphere was particularly awkward to use, but overpowered if used perfectly. So we removed it, and replaced it with Healing Surge for Windwalkers and Brewmasters.

Surging Mist is now available to allMonk specializations. It costs 30 Energy in or Tiger Stance, and continues to cost mana in Serpent Stanceand Crane Stance. However, it only generates Chi for Mistweaver Monks.

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

Monk ability consolidation is fairly straightforward. It includes merging of some passive abilities, and removing unneeded abilities that didn't create the gameplay depth they had been intended to.

Mistweaver Changes

About midway through the expansion, it became clear that mana was not valuable for Mistweavers. We tried some adjustments to solve that, but it proved too large of a change to make at the time. We chose to just live with that problem for the time being, and tune them around not really caring much about Spirit or mana (once they reached epic gear).

Now that we have the time to tweak things for Mistweavers to acquire new gear, we're making changes to get them in the right spot. Initially, we experimented with giving Mistwavers a 1-second global cooldown (GCD) akin to that of the Rogue to give them a faster combat feel. However, it's proven difficult to balance. Haste is attractive to healers because it lowers not just cast time but GCD as well. Therefore, Monks valued Haste much less than other healers. We explored a few options, but ultimately landed on changing the core GCD for Mistweavers from 1 second to the standard 1.5 seconds, which you will be able to reduce with Haste. This will feel jarring at first, but we're confident that it's for the best, long-term.

All abilities available to Mistweavers now have a 1.5-second global cooldown (up from 1 second).

Crackling Jade Lightning's throughput has been increased by 100%, but it no longer generates Chi for Mistweaver Monks. Additionally, it is free in Stance of the Wise Serpent.Chi Brew now grants 1 charge of Mana Tea (down from 2 charges). Ascension now increases maximum Mana by 20% (up from 15%).

Detonate Chi is a new spell available to Mistweaver Monks, instantly detonating all Healing Spheres, and causing each of them to heal a nearby ally within 12 yards of the sphere with a 15-second cooldown.Healing Spheres now heal an ally within 12 yards (up from 6 yards) for 100% (up from 50%) of their normal healing, when they expire.Soothing Mist's healing has been increased by 100%, its GCD has been reduced to 0.5 seconds, but no longer heals immediately, and no longer generates Chi.Stance of the Wise Serpent no longer increases Haste from items by 50%.Summon Jade Serpent Statue now has a 10-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds).Thunder Focus Tea no longer costs Chi, causes the next Renewing Mist to jump up to 4 times (instead of causing the next Uplift to refresh the duration of Renewing Mists on all targets). Its effect on Surging Mist remains unchanged.Jade Mist is a new passive ability for Mistweaver Monks, causing them to gain 5% more of the Multistrike stat from all sources, and also causes Renewing Mist and Rising Sun Kick to have a chance equal to Multistrike chance to not go on cooldown when used. This effect cannot trigger on the next Renewing Mist or Rising Sun Kick.

Another issue with Mistweavers is that of Eminence, which has never really played out how we had hoped. The intent with Eminence was to create an alternate play style to fulfill the fantasy of healing through dealing damage, since we knew a lot of players had that fantasy, and a new class was the perfect opportunity to satisfy that.

Having two play styles in one spec (Eminence, and traditional Mistweaving, healing primarily through casting heals) proved challenging to balance, because we don't want players to take the best parts of both and stack them into an unintended superior spec. The most notorious of these cases was "Jab-Jab-Uplift". In order to solve this problem, we're giving Mistweavers two stances. Stance of the Wise Serpent will continue to be the stance from which to do traditional Mistweaving. The new Stance of the Spirited Crane will be the stance to use for Eminence. You can swap stances at will, with only the cost of a GCD and any current Chi that you've accrued. The intention is that Crane Stance allows Mistweavers to trade healing for damage; it should fall somewhere in the middle between being a full healer, and being a full damage dealer.

Crackling Jade Lightning channels 150% faster, generates 1 Chi each time it deals damage, but costs 300% more mana.Blackout Kicks grants Crane's Zeal, increasing Critical Strike chance by 20% for 20 seconds.Blackout Kick causes Eminence to heal 5 allies instead of 1, but heals for only 20% of damage dealt instead of 35%.The Monk gains a stack of Vital Mists for every Chi consumed. Vital Mists reduces the cast time and Mana cost of the next Surging Mist by 20% per stack up to a maximum of 5 stacks.Muscle Memory has been removed.Serpent's Zeal has been removed.Vital Mists has been removed.

Healing Spheres have been improved. You'll no longer waste them when running over multiples at once when you only need a little healing. We significantly improved the Mistweavers' Healing Spheres effect when they expire. We also made Afterlife's Healing Spheres consistent with the rest of the class.

When a player runs through multiple Healing Spheres at once, only as many as needed to heal the player to full health will be consumed (instead of all of them if the player is injured at all).

Healing Spheres summoned by Mastery: Gift of the Serpent (Mistweaver) now heal an injured ally within 12 yards (up from 6 yards) for 100% (up from 50%) of their normal effect when they expire, and scales with Spell Power instead of Attack Power.

Healing Spheres generated from Gift of the Ox now heals the Monk if they are within 6 yards of the sphere when it expires.

Shared Ability Changes

There were several changes that affected multiple Monk specializations. We'd like to see Monks using Transcendence more often, so its usability has been improved (some baseline, and some in a Draenor Perk). For Touch of Death, we like that it's a unique execute being usable only once, but found it impractical to use on bosses and have improved its usability. For Tiger Strikes, we buffed it to grant Multistrike ability which it was similar to already, and extended it to work with all Monk specializations. To better balance the damage of Brewmaster versus Windwalker where both share many of the same abilities, we removed the damage increase provided by Tiger Stance, and increased the damage of melee abilities to compensate.

Tiger Strikes is now available to all Monk specializations, and has a chance to trigger on successful auto attacks and their Multistrikes. It has an 8% chance to trigger while using a two-handed weapon, and a 5% chance to trigger while dual wielding.

When triggered, Tiger Strikes now grants a 25% increase to Multistrike for 8 seconds instead of a 50% increase to attack speed and double attacks for 4 attacks.

Touch of Death is no longer available to Mistweaver Monks, and is usable on targets that have 10% or less health remaining, or have less current health than your maximum health. The rules against players remain unchanged.Transcendence: Transfer no longer has an energy or mana cost.

Windwalker Changes

For Energy-based gameplay to function well, the primary limitation on ability usage should be Energy, not time. That breaks down when a rotation becomes limited by available GCDs, rather than by Energy. Windwalkers were hitting this “GCD-cap” too easily, causing scaling problems as they geared up, and removing rotational choices. To solve this problem, we’ve made a few tweaks that will slow down their rotation slightly; but still allow Windwalkers who enjoy the GCD-capped playstyle to have options available to focus on Haste and Energy regeneration. Individually, these may sound like significant nerfs, but Windwalker damage has been adjusted to compensate for these changes. The goal is to address the issue with GCD-capping while not reducing DPS.

Combo Breaker now has an 8% chance to trigger, per effect, per Jab (down from 12%).

There are a couple of additional changes for Windwalkers. Storm, Earth, and Fire, got buffed to make it smoother to use. We also buffed Fists of Fury because we felt that the ability wasn't giving a strong enough damage boost given its restrictions and impact on the Monk's rotation.

Stance of the Fierce Tiger now increases all damage done by 20%

Fists of Fury now deals 100% increased damage, and always deal full damage to the primary target; additional targets are still affected by the damage split.

Storm, Earth, and Fire no longer has an energy cost, and is off global cooldown.

Brewmaster Changes

For Brewmasters, Gift of the Ox has been modified to allow it to scale defensively with the new Multistrike stat. The Black Ox Statue has been modified to aid Monks in establishing threat on new enemies instead of shielding allies. We also removed the Misfire effect, as it did not live up to its original idea, and was unnecessary.

Black Ox Statue no longer casts Guard on allies and now has a 10-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds). Black Ox Statue now passively attracts the attention of all enemies within 30 yards, causing a minor amount of threat each second.

Dizzying Haze now has no Energy cost but no longer causes the target's melee attacks to sometimes misfire.

Gift of the Ox now has a chance to trigger only from auto attack Multistrikes, instead of from all auto attacks. It has a 100% chance to trigger while using a two-handed weapon, and a 62.5% chance to trigger while dual wielding.

Stance of the Sturdy Ox now increases Stamina by 25% 40% (up from 20%), reduces magic damage taken by 10% (down from all damage taken by 25%), and grants a 50% increase to Armor, but no longer increases Energy regeneration.

Redemption's mana cost has been reduced by 95%.Selfless Healer no longer causes Bastion of Glory to apply to Flash Heal. For Holy Paladins, it now increases the healing of Flash Heal on others by 35% per stack (up from 20%). For Retribution and Protection Paladins, the effect on Flash of Light remains unchanged. Sword of Light now increases damage by 25% (down from 30%).

Holy Changes

We made several changes for Holy, to go along with other larger system changes to compensate for the removal of Guardian of Ancient Kings from Holy, and merged its benefits into Divine Favor. In order to follow through on our change to merge all types of Haste %, we removed the Spell Haste % from Seal of Insight to a Holy-only passive, so that it didn't also increase Protection's baseline Haste by 10%. Our changes to healer mana and mobility also indirectly increased the value of Selfless Healer by a large amount, so we brought it back down to be even in power with the other talents on its row. We also raised the range of Denounce to be consistent with other spells. Lastly, we adjusted the critical strike chance of Holy Shock, to increase the value of Critical Strike for s.

Protection Changes

For Protection, we tweaked Eternal Flame in order to reduce its massive self-healing amount, and provide better balance between talents on that row. We also added a new passive, Shining Protector, in order to give defensive value to the new Multistrike stat.Holy Wrath's damage and cooldown were also increased, and Sanctified Wrath changed to buff it further, in order to give Protection Paladins more burst threat and damage, while retaining its core damage-splitting identity.

Mastery: Divine Bulwark now increases damage reduction from Shield of the Righteous by 6% (scaling with Mastery, down from starting at 8%), and causes Bastion of Glory to increase healing received from Word of Glory by 6% (scaling with Mastery, down from starting at 8%).

Miscellaneous Changes

We made a few additional changes to Paladins. We revised the functionality of Hammer of the Righteous a bit, such that its performance is about the same, but its tooltip is much clearer. We also made Stay of Execution much more attractive to use as an emergency button. We also revised how Eternal Flame interacts with Holy Power, and allowed it to once again trigger Illuminated Healing. One big change for Retribution that isn't mentioned here is the removal of Inquisition (see Ability Pruning), which will have a notable effect on their rotation.

Eternal Flame's periodic healing effect has been changed. Its duration now scales with Holy Power, instead of its healing. Its effect at 3 Holy Power remains unchanged.

Hammer of the Righteous now deals 50% Physical weapon damage (up from 15%) to the primary target, but the primary target is no longer hit with the Holy damage.

Priests received several significant changes, mainly focused on reining in Discipline's damage absorption shields, improving quality of life for Discipline and Holy specializations, and solving single-target damage issues for Shadow.

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

Borrowed Time's effects have been merged into baseline Power Word: Shield for Discipline Priests.Borrowed Time has been redesigned. It now increases the Priest's stat gains to Haste from all sources by 40% for 6 seconds.

Devouring Plague now always costs 3 Shadow Orbs, and how heals the Priest for 100% of all damage it deals, instead of healing per tick.Holy Fire now lasts 9 seconds (up from 7 seconds).Shadowform no longer allows any healing spells to be cast but also no longer has a restriction on casting other Holy spells.Vampiric Embrace now heals all party and raid members for 10% of damage done, and this healing is no longer split between targets (up from 75% of damage done, split between targets).Lightwell's healing effect is no longer canceled if the target takes enough damage.Pain Suppression no longer reduces the target's threat by 5%.Dispersion and Vampiric Touch no longer restores mana.

Evangelism no longer affects the damage or mana cost of spells. Damage of affected spells have been adjusted to compensate.Shadow Word: Pain's initial damage is now considered direct damage, not periodic damage.

Divine Hymn now heals all party or raid members instead of a variable number depending on raid size. Its healing has been adjusted to compensate.Focused Will now triggers from any damage taken instead of being limited to being the victim of any damage above 5% of total health or being critically hit by non-periodic attacks.

Level-90 Talents and Atonement

Atonement was the original damage-to-healing conversion ability, but grew out of control during Mists of Pandaria. We decided to reduce its effectiveness, to bring it more in line with our goal of it being an option to trade significant healing for significant damage (ending up somewhere between a full healer and a full damage dealer). Another place where Discipline's absorbs were too strong was in their interaction with the level-90 Talents, especially in large Raids. Near the end of Mists of Pandaria, we uncapped the AoE healing of that Talent row; that has proven to be a mistake in Discipline's case, not just because it caused the level-90 Talents themselves to heal for too much, but rather because the gigantic overhealing that that produced translated into gigantic Divine Aegis absorbs.

Discipline and Holy: The abilities now heal for 50% less, costs 67% less mana, and no longer damages enemies.

Shadow: The abilities now costs 67% less mana, but no longer heals allies.

Holy Changes

For Holy Priests, our biggest concern is with the Chakras. We think that Chakras are the defining abilities of Holy Priests, but that they haven't lived up to their potential. We decided to move more of their effectiveness from their raw throughput buff (which felt like a penalty for being in the wrong chakra, rather than a bonus for being in the right Chakra) into their bonus effects, and the Holy Word spells that they grant. Please note that all Priest healing spells have been retuned to account for the loss of throughput increases from Chakras. We also returned Renew to a normal 1.5-secondglobal cooldown (GCD), so that Renew blanketing is still possible, but less ideal without Haste. Finally, the ability for Power Word: Shield to critically strike or Multistrike is now baseline for all Priest specializations instead of just Discipline so that it continues to be a viable choice for Holy at higher gear levels.

Shadow Changes

s had one large problem toward the end of Mists of Pandaria: single-target damage. Their AoE and multi-DoT damage was some of the best around, so they still ended up competitive on most fights. But, in any fight that was mostly single-target, they felt lacking. Additionally, one of the new stats we're adding in Warlords of Draenor, Multistrike, is almost exactly what their current Mastery, Shadowy Recall, does for DoTs. So, we took these two problems and came up with a change that we think will solve both of them. The result is a new Mastery, which primarily increases single-target damage. s who want to focus on single-target damage can aim for Mastery in their gearing; or, when multi-dotting is more valuable, prefer other secondary stats over Mastery.

's Mastery (Shadowy Recall) has been replaced with a new Mastery: Mental Anguish.

The cooldown of Mind Blast has also been adjusted to make Haste more valuable for Shadow, and removes Haste breakpoints.

Mind Blast's cooldown is now reduced by haste, but its base cooldown is now 9 seconds (up from 8 seconds).

Talent Revisions

Several talents were split into different versions by specialization. We revised the effectiveness of some of these talents to better balance talent choices on their row. We also swapped the Level-15 and Level-60 talent rows so players are presented with core Priest themed abilities earlier in the leveling process.

To get back to a balanced place, we've reapplied the AoE caps to the level-90 Talents, making them consistent with all other AoE heals, and reduced their effectiveness across the board. We've compensated for this in the tuning of Priest baseline heals.

From Darkness, Comes Light has been split into two abilities depending on the Priest's specialization.

Surge of Darkness (Shadow) now has a maximum of 3 charges (up from 2) and can now also trigger its effect from Devouring Plague, but its chance to trigger has been reduced to 10% (down from 20%) to compensate.

Surge of Light (Discipline, Holy) activation chance has been reduced to 8% (down from 15%).

Twist of Fate now only triggers from healing for Discipline and Holy Priests, and only triggers from damage for s.

Miscellaneous Changes

First, there are a couple of quality-of-life changes for Prayer of Mending and Angelic Feathers. Next is a fix for a problem with Void Tendrils, where it lasts its full duration against creatures that had no way to attack it, such as in certain Raid encounters (note that the health reduction is to keep it where it was in health, compared to player health doubling). We also removed the Mana generation from Shadowfiend, in order to simplify it to being a burst-damage-cooldown. And last but certainly not least, we're making Holy Nova an efficient AoE healing spell for Discipline Priests.

Angelic Feathersnow increases movement speed by 60% (down from 80%). If cast on players, will always prefer the casting Priest over others, then pick the player closest to the targeted location. If there are no players where it is targeted, it will still create a feather that can be picked up, as before. Additionally, when collecting multiple feathers, the duration will be extended instead of replaced; up to a maximum of 130% of base duration.

Enlightenment is a new passive ability for Discipline Priests. Enlightenment increases the critical healing chance of Prayer of Mending by 10%, and increases stat gains to Critical Strike from all sources by 5%.

Holy Nova is no longer available through a Major Glyph, and is instead a Discipline specialization spell. Its mana cost has been lowered and its healing increased. It is intended as the efficient area-of-effect (AoE) healing spell for Discipline Priests.Prayer of Mending from multiple Priests can now be on the same target, and can be on multiple targets from the same Priest, but the ability has a 1.5-second cast time(up from instant cast). (See also: Instant Cast Heals)Shadowfiend no longer restores mana.

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section above for discussion of why we're pruning class abilities. For Rogues, a couple of abilities were changed to be specialization specific where they were redundant, did some thinning on cooldown.

Tricks of the Trade now has no energy cost and no longer increases damage caused by the target by 15%.

Venomous Wounds's effects have been merged into baseline Rupture for s. It no longer triggers from Garrote and now always triggers when Rupture deals damage (up from a 75% chance).

Combo Points

The biggest change for Rogues is a fundamental change to how Combo Points work. They're now shared across all enemies; you can swap targets and you won't lose your Combo Points.

Combo Points for Rogues are now shared across all targets and they are no longer lost when switching targets.

Redirect has been removed.

Combat Changes

Bandit's Guile is an interesting mechanic that is important to Combat gameplay, but wasn't working out quite as well as we think that it could. In particular, there's basically no way to adjust when you're going to be in Deep Insight, other than stopping your rotation (and thus wasting energy, combo points, temporary effects, cooldown time, etc.). So, we're making an adjustment to Revealing Strike and Bandit's Guile. The intention here is that you can use Revealing Strike in place of Sinister Strike when you want to delay Deep Insight (such as to line it up with a specific upcoming fight mechanic), and have little lost damage besides the overall Deep Insight uptime. We don't expect this nuanced rotation adjustment to be used by all Combat Rogues, but having a little more control over the pace of your rotation will be useful to some.

Also worth noting here is the removal of Ambidexterity. This was done to reduce the amount of damage coming from auto attacks for Combat Rogues. We've increased the damage of their active abilities to compensate and make them more rewarding.

Finally, we changed Main Gauche to accentuate the importance of the off-hand weapon for Combat.

Area-of-Effect Attacks (Assassination, Combat)

Seal Fate now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Rogue's primary target.

Subtlety Changes

Honor Among Thieves is an extremely powerful ability, but has the downside that it adds significant disparity between character power while soloing and while in a group. We made this change to bring up the soloing Subtlety Rogue, without having a significant impact on their performance while in a group. The passive ability Sinister Calling also received significant change to better balance scaling rates, the value of secondary stats, improve Multistrike for them, and add rotational depth.

Backstab can now be used on either side of the target, in addition to behind the target. (See also:Facing Requirements)

Hemorrhage’s periodic damage is now based on attack power (instead of the initial strike's damage), and ticks every 2 seconds. Damage has been adjusted to compensate.Honor Among Thieves can now also be triggered by critical hits from the Rogue's melee Auto Attacks.

Sinister Calling now increases Agility by 15% (down from 30%), and the amount of Multistrike bonus received from all sources by 5% (in order to act as Subtlety's Secondary Stat Attunement). And finally, when the rogue Multistrikes with Backstab or Ambush, they also twist the blade, causing all Bleed effects to advance by 2 seconds, triggering an instant tick.

Subterfuge has proved too powerful, and frustrating to play against in PvP, so we decided to reduce its defensive capabilities, while preserving its offensive power. We changed the Subterfuge period to allow the use of stealth abilities without actually stealthing you, similar to Shadow Dance.

Subterfuge now allows you to use abilities that require stealth for 3 seconds after leaving Stealth, instead of actually staying stealthed for 3 seconds.

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

Shaman had a number of extra abilities that were consolidated to provide a smoother rotation flow. Mana regeneration and mana costs for Elemental and Enhancement were made compensate for abilities removed via Ability Pruning. The removal of Weapon Imbues was significant. There was always one right answer for each specialization, and so we made the appropriate Weapon Imbue passive to each spec, or tuned abilities around its removal.

Finally, there's the removal of Rolling Thunder. In concept, this is a simple merger of Rolling Thunder into Fulmination, but also with some consolidation of its effects; the mana recovery component was removed along with other mana changes, and the random chance was removed while maximum stack size was increased to compensate. The randomness in Rolling Thunder became redundant, because there already was a source of randomness in Elemental Overload now that Multistrikes trigger it.

Flurry's duration has been increased to 30 seconds.Frost Shock no longer generates additional threat.Greater Healing Wave has been renamed to Healing Wave.Healing Tide Totem now heals all party or raid members, but amount healed per target has been reduced to compensate.Lava Lash now spreads Flame Shock to up to 6 nearby enemies (up from 4 enemies).Roiling Thunder has been removed.

Elemental Shaman Mana regeneration has been increased by 50% to compensate.

Shamanistic Rage no longer reduces Mana costs while active.Thunderstorm no longer regenerates Mana.Totems will no longer cause hostile creatures to enter combat with the Shaman based on proximity.Unleash Elements has been split into different versions based on specialization.

Unleash Elements is now available only to , and now increases attack speed by 60% (up from 50%), and increases the damage of the Shaman's next Fire spell by 40% (up from 30%), but no longer deals direct damage or requires an enemy target.

Unleash Flame has been made into a separate ability available only to , and now increases the damage of the Shaman's next Fire spell by 40% (up from 30%), but no longer deals direct damage or requires an enemy target.

Unleash Life has been made into a separate ability available only to , and now heals an ally and increases the effect of the Shaman's next direct heal by 30%.

Unleashed Fury now provides similar benefits, but applied as buffs to the Shaman, instead of debuffs to an enemy. For Enhancement Shamans, it now grants 5% increase Multistrike chance instead of causing your auto attacks to trigger Static Shock.

Elemental and Enhancement Changes

For Elemental and Enhancement, we had a few problems to solve. Enhancement suffers from having their damage split among so many damage sources that none of it feels impressive. We changed the damage of several abilities to try to reorganize their damage into fewer, more impactful abilities, while keeping the net total the same. For a long time was one of the specializations most impacted by movement, at a time where other casters were increasingly able to cast while moving.

In Warlords of Draenor, we're pulling back on the ability for many casters to deal damage while moving, and that includes Elemental. They will still have some ability to deal damage while moving, through Shocks, Unleash Weapon, and instant Lava Bursts. For Chain Lightning, we wanted to reduce the impact of Haste soft capping, and so changed Shamanism to increase damage instead of reduce cast time. Additionally, we simplified Wind Shear by removing its impact on threat, which no longer matters.

Ascendance for the Enhancement specialization now changes the Shaman's auto attacks and Stormstrike to deal Wind-based physical damage that bypasses armor.

One of the new secondary stats Multistrike, functions very similarly to Elemental Overload. We wanted to keep Mastery and Multistrike feeling distinct, but also know how iconic and important Elemental Overload is for . So, we decided to merge the two together with Multistrike driving Elemental Overload, and give the Elemental specialization a new Mastery. For the new Mastery, we wanted to strengthen the 's connection to earth energies, and added damage that continues while the Shaman is moving. The summary of all this is that if you liked Mastery before, favor Multistrike instead for the same effect. Or try out the new Mastery: Molten Earth. Chain Lightning and Earthquake were also improved significantly to offset the fact that Elemental Overload was a massive buff to it, but Mastery: Molten Earth is not.

Elemental Overload is now a regular passive ability and is no longer increased by Mastery. It grants 35% increased Multistrike damage and healing, and an additional 20% to Multistrike chance. It also increases the amount of the Multistrike stat gains from all sources by 5%, serving as Elemental's Secondary Stat attunement.

Ability Consolidation and Refinement

Soulburn had several extremely niche spell amplifications which were removed. We distinguished Hand of Gul'dan and Chaos Wave further by removing the snare from the former and improving the snare of the latter. Beyond that, there was a simple consolidation of some abilities.

All of the various Soulburn effects are now learned together with Soulburn, instead of at different levels.

Demonic Gateways no longer have charges (up from being limited to 5 charges). Every Party or Raid member can use them once every 90 seconds (up from 45 seconds). The maximum distance apart they can be placed is now 40 yards (down from 70 yards).

Healthstone's cooldown will now not reset until the player leaves combat. Healing from this ability is now a flat amount (instead of a % of maximum health) and can no longer be a Critical Effect.

Affliction Changes

For Affliction, we're happy with their rotation. But, Drain Soul was causing them to be too strong in situations where they had a steady supply of small creatures to kill. We reduced the effectiveness of its on-kill effect in order to solve this. Additionally, Soul Swap was changed to cost 1 Soul Shard to push it into its intended role of being a more expensive but faster method of applying your periodic damage effects, and better balance it against Haunt.

Demonology Changes

We were unsatisfied with Grimoire of Sacrifice for Demonology. Fundamentally, it did not fit Demonology's theme to sacrifice their pet, full time. We had toyed with ideas where it acted as a temporary cooldown for Demonology, but have decided to replace it with a new talent, which is more theme-appropriate, and fits well against the competition in that talent row. We also tweaked the design of Master Demonologist, in order to solve some edge cases, and simplify and clarify its effects.

Movement Abilities

We've reduced the ability for ranged damage dealers to deal damage while moving in Warlords. Kil'jaeden's Cunning became a problematic talent because its mobility made Warlocks much stronger compared to other casters. We redesigned how the ability works to be more powerful in bursts instead of always affecting only some spells.

Miscellaneous

Finally, there are a couple of miscellaneous changes. For Drain Life, we reduced the base healing somewhat, but massively increased the effectiveness of the Glyph which increases its healing, so as to help open up more potential Drain Life use in ideal situations. And lastly, we simplified Shadowburn a bit.

Ability Pruning

See the Ability Pruning section above for discussion of why we're pruning class abilities. For Warriors, we focused on removing abilities that were redundant, and making some tweaks to their rotations.

Stance Changes

Warriors have always had stances; they're very important to the feeling of being a Warrior. In order to make stances more meaningful, and ease keybinds, we made stances have their own action bars, and re-added stance restrictions on abilities. However, we also made it so that you'll automatically be shifted into the appropriate stance if you try to use an ability that isn't usable in your current stance. One important difference between this and previous incarnations of Warrior stances is that these abilities are rotational, not utility cooldowns. Stances are now more for different gameplay modes (dealing damage vs. tanking). There shouldn’t be cases where you find yourself swapping stances, use an ability, and then immediately swapping back.

Warrior Stances now once again have their own action bars.

Attempting to use an ability that requires a different stance will now automatically switch to that stance.

For Arms and Fury Warriors, Shield Barrier can be used without a shield.

Arms Changes

We wanted to fix a few problems with Warriors. Prominently, we still weren't happy with Arms' rotation (and neither were many players), so we've made some more changes. The goal is to remove needless complexity while simultaneously adding more depth. As mentioned in the above section on Ability Pruning, Overpower and Heroic Strike have been removed for Arms Warriors. In their place, Slam now costs less Rage, and Execute has been revised to provide more dynamic gameplay throughout the whole fight while still retaining its identity of a low-health finisher.

In addition, we weren't satisfied with the Mastery for Arms. The intended flavor for Arms is about hitting with few, big, and heavy weapon strikes. Strikes of Opportunity actually went opposite of that, adding frequent little hits. We've replaced Strikes of Opportunity with a new Mastery which accentuates their intended design.

Burst Damage Cooldowns

As with other classes, we wanted to reduce cooldown stacking. Cutting Skull Banner did a ton to help that across the whole game. But for Warriors specifically, we needed to make further changes, including merging some of the personal benefit of back into Recklessness. Also, to make up for Throw being removed, we modified Heroic Throw to be more frequently usable.

Heroic Throw is now a high-threat ability, generating 300% extra threat, has a 6-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds), but now has a 15 yard minimum range.

Haste has long been a problematic stat for Warriors, usually being of little value. As part of our commitment to ensuring all secondary stats are valuable (except Bonus Armor for non-tanks and Spirit for non-healers, of course), we're making a significant change to Warriors, to ensure that Haste has strong, competitive value. We're giving all Warriors a new passive, which lets haste affect their global cooldown, and the cooldowns of their very-short-cooldown rotational abilities.

Protection Changes

Protection Warriors have received a few notable changes. First, we removed Dodge and Parry from gear, and expect Protection Warriors to value Haste and Critical Strike as important secondary stats. In order to achieve that, we made Riposte give defensive value to Critical Strike. The aforementioned Headlong Rush also helps for valuing Haste.

Blood Craze causes Multistrike auto attacks to trigger a Blood Craze, which regenerates 3% of the Warrior's health over 3 seconds. When this effect is refreshed, the remainingduration is added to the new effect.

Riposte now gives the Warrior Parry equal to their Critical Strike bonus from gear.

Shield Block now regenerates a new charge every 12 seconds (up from every 9 seconds).Unwavering Sentinel no longer increases Armor, but now also reduces the chance for attacks to be parried by 3%. (See also: Hit and Expertise Removal.)

Talent Changes

A few Warrior talents also were in need of revision. First, Second Wind was problematic; it was sometimes too weak, and sometimes too strong. We chose to change it from a passive health regeneration effect to the new Leech effect, so that low-health Warriors have to maintain combat in order to benefit, instead of kiting, hiding, or otherwise playing defensively. Enraged Regeneration was changed to account for the removal of Enrage from Arms.

The level-45 talent row was removed for crowd-control disarmament reasons, and also wanted to allow you to choose more rotational complexity through talents. We replaced the row with new talents, many of which are specialization-specific, giving you a variety of playstyle choices for your Warrior.

For the level-60 and level-90 Talent rows, certain combinations were proving problematic. We decided that Stormbolt would better compete with Shockwave and Dragon Roar, and that Bladestorm would better compete with Avatar and Bloodbath, so swapped Stormbolt and Bladestorm's positions. We also adjusted the effects of a few talents in order to make them more competitive with the talents on their row.

Sudden Death causes auto-attack hits to have a 10% chance to make the next Execute free and useable on any target, regardless of health level. These Executes do not consume additional Rage to deal additional damage.

Piercing Howl is now available to all Fury Warriors as a baseline ability.

Disrupting Shout has been removed and replaced with 3 new talents that vary by specialization.

Protection: Unyielding Strikes: Devastate reduces the cost of Heroic Strike by 6 Rage for 6 seconds, stacking up to 5 times. Once this effect reaches 5 applications, its duration will no longer refresh.

Fury Changes

Fury Warriors received a few additional changes. In particular, Heroic Strike has been removed for Fury Warriors, and modified Wild Strike to fill the role of quick excess Rage dump. We also made a revision to the Critical Strike chance of Bloodthirst to make them less crit-dependant. A new glyph has been added which gives Fury Warriors a choice for a notably different playstyle. Auto attack damage had become too high, so we also moved some damage from that into Execute (which has been changed to deal damage based on Weapon Damage, instead of just Attack Power). In order to make sure that you're able to spend all of your resources within each Colossus Smash window, we added an extension to it onto Raging Blow. Plus, we've updated some to spell alerts to improve usability.

Bloodsurge's effects have been merged into baseline Bloodthirst and no longer reduce Wild Strike's global cooldown. Its spell alert has moved to the top slot instead of the left and right slots and now has 2 charges (down from 3 charges).

Wild Strike now has a 0.75 second baseline global cooldown and costs 45 Rage.

Bloodthirst now has 30% additional Critical Strike chance (instead of double the normal Critical Strike chance).Crazed Berserker no longer increases auto attack damage. Instead, it also causes Execute to hit with the off-hand weapon.Raging Blow now extends the duration of Colossus Smash by 2 seconds, and has a spell alert on the left and right slots.Glyph of Colossus Smash is a new glyph available to Fury Warriors. The glyph increases the duration of Colossus Smash's effect to 20 seconds, but reduces its effectiveness.

We also expanded Enrage to affect all damage, not just Physical damage, and increased its duration slightly so that it can cover burst windows like Colossus Smash adequately.. We're also making a change to the design of Deep Wounds, to try to limit is effectiveness in PvP, without hurting its effectiveness in PvE.

Mastery: Unshackled Fury (Fury) now increases all damage (up from only Physical damage).

Deep Wounds now lasts 15 seconds, or until the target is healed to full health.

Players on a non-PvP realm joining a cross-realm group now receive a confirmation prompt warning that they may cross into a PvP enabled realm by joining the group.

The War Games command line parameter has been changed to accept BattleTag or RealID friend as the first argument.

Example usage: /wg BattleTagfriend arena tournamentrules

Both arena and tournamentrules are optional. The arena parameter if specified will do a best-match search of valid arenas or a random one will be chosen. If tournamentrules hasn’t been set, it will default to false.

Items

Items listed for sale on the Alliance, Horde, and neutral auction houses have now been combined together on a per-realm basis.

The Patch 6.0.2 PTR Patch Notes have been posted. They are the same as the Beta patch notes, which are in our class guides, so you can either read the Beta patch notes, or visit our class guides to learn about the class-specific changes:

Icy Talons now increases attack speed by 20% 35% (down from 45%), and haste by 5% (up from 0%).

Might of the Frozen Wastes now increases the damage of Obliterate by 50% (up from 40%) and melee damage by 35% (up from 30%) while wielding a two-handed weapon, and increases the damage of Frost Strike by 50% (up from 35%) while dual-wielding.

Razorice now deals 4% additional weapon damage (up from 2%), and increases Frost damage by 2% 4% per stack (down up from 3%).

Veteran of the Third War now increases your critical strike chance, Multistrike chance, haste, and Stamina by 10% (up from 9% to Stamina only), reduces the chance for attacks to be parried by 3%, increases the damage of Death Strike by 100%, and grants 1 Runic Power per second while in combat.

Conversion no longer has an initial tick, and now costs 30 15 Runic Power/second for Blood, 10 Runic Power/second for Frost, and 20 Runic Power/second for Unholy.

Barkskin's no longer provides pushback protection, but its cooldown has been reduced to 30 seconds.

Nature's Vigil, while active, increases single-target damage and healing caused by healing spells by 30% (up from 25%), and all single-target damage spells also heal a nearby friendly target for 40% of the damage done (up from 25%). Its healing now targets allies within 40 yards of the Druid (instead of within 40 yards of the target).

Cobra Strikes now has a 20% chance to trigger (up from a 15% chance), but now only grants 1 charge each time it triggers (down from 2 charges).

Thrill of the Hunt now has a 6% chance to trigger for every 10 Focus spent (instead of a flat 30% chance). has a 20% chance to trigger (down from 30%).

We've changed the combat rotations of each Hunter specialization (primarily through Ability Pruning) with the goal of them being a platform to build upon with talents. To facilitate this, we've modified several talents to add additional rotational depth. Hunters had many talent options which added abilities to their rotation, but most of them had quite simple usage, with little interaction with your rotation or other abilities. Now, there should be more of a variety; still some simple talents, but also some talents that create a more engaging combat rotation.Barrage now has a 20 second cooldown (down from 30 seconds), costs 60 Focus (up from 30 Focus), and its damage has been increased by 100%.

Murder of Crows has been changed. Its duration, cost, and cooldown have been reduced by 50%. It no longer has a shorter cooldown when used on low health targets. Instead, its cooldown is reset if the target dies.

Fervor has been replaced with a new passive ability, Steady Focus. Steady Focus increases Focus Regeneration by 50% for 10 seconds after using Cobra Shot or Steady Shot twice in a row, or after using Focusing Shot.

Survivalist increases Multistrike damage by 20% the chance to Multistrike by 10%, and causes the Hunter to gain 15% health over 10 seconds after killing a target.

can no longer be used to heal the Mage's Water Elemental.

The Brain Freeze effect now increases Frostfire Bolt's damage by 25% 15%, and can now stack up to 2 times. It also no longer triggers from the Bomb Talents, and instead has a 10% chance to trigger from casts. Each Multistrike of Frostbolt increases that cast's chance by an additional 25%. (Total of 60% on double-Multistrikes).

Warlords of Draenor Beta Patch Notes

The latest Warlords of Draenor Beta Patch Notes have just been released! Our TL;DR summary breaks down all the changes by class, and you can see the full notes below:

Icy Talons now increases attack speed by 35% (down from 45%), and haste by 5% (up from 0%).

Glyph of Rune Tap has been redesigned. It now reduces Rune Tap’s recharge time by 10 seconds, but reduces the damage reduction it provides by 20%.

Starfall no longer cancels when mounting. However, it can no longer hit stealthed or invisible targets.

Wild Mushrooms no longer become invisible.

Mastery: Primal Tenacity causes the Druid to gain a Physical absorb shield equal to 12% 16% of the attack’s damage when they are hit by a Physical attack. Attacks which this effect fully or partially absorbs cannot trigger Primal Tenacity.

Soul of the Forest (Guardian) now increases Mangle’s Rage generation by 5 (down from 10).

Incarnation: Tree of Life no longer enhances Lifebloom. Instead, it also enhances Rejuvenation, increasing its healing by 50%, and reducing its cost by 50%.

Heart of the Wild (Restoration) now increases healing done by 35% (up from 25%).

Soul of the Forest (Restoration) when casting Swiftmend, the Druid gains Soul of the Forest. Soul of the Forest reduces the cast time of the next Healing Touch by 50%, or increases the healing of the next Regrowth, or Rejuvenation, or Wild Growth by 100%, or increases the healing of the next Wild Growth by 50%.

Thrill of the Hunt now has a 20% chance to trigger (down from 30%).

Presence of Mind is no longer a talent, and is now learned by only Arcane Mages.

Evanesce is a new Talent available at level 15, replacing Presence of Mind.

Alter Time now lasts for 10 15 seconds (up from 6 seconds), has a 90-second cooldown (down from 3 minutes), and no longer affects the Mage’s mana, buffs, or debuffs.

The Brain Freeze effect now increases Frostfire Bolt's damage by 15% 25%, and can now stack up to 2 times. It also no longer triggers from the Bomb Talents, and instead has a 10% chance to trigger from Frostbolt casts. Each Multistrike of Frostbolt increases that cast's chance by an additional 25%. (Total of 60% on double-Multistrikes).

Power Strikes now triggers every 15 seconds (up from every 20 seconds).

Chi Brew now grants 1 charge of Mana Tea (down from 2 charges).

Ascension now increases maximum Mana by 20% 10% (up from 15%).

Eminence now causes a nearby target to be healed for 50% 35% of all damage caused by the Monk and includes auto attacks.

Blackout Kick causes Eminence to heal 5 allies instead of 1, but heals for only 20% 15% of damage dealt instead of 35%.

Jab now costs 45 Energy while in Stance of the Fierce Tiger.

Stance of the Fierce Tiger now increases all damage done by 20% now also increases Jab’s energy cost by 10.

Elusive Brew now increases dodge chance by 45% 35% (up from 30%).

Selfless Healer no longer causes Bastion of Glory to apply to Flash of Light. However, it now increases the healing of Flash of Light on others by 35% per stack (up from 20%).

Sword of Light now increases damage by 25% (down from 30%).

Borrowed Time has been redesigned. It now increases the Priest's stat gains to Haste from all sources by 40% for 6 seconds.

Surge of Light (Discipline, Holy) activation chance has been reduced to 8% 10% (down from 15%).

Enlightenment is a new passive ability for Discipline Priests.Enlightenment increases the critical healing chance of Prayer of Mending by 10%, and increases stat gains to Critical Strike from all sources by 5%.

Assassin’s Resolve now increases damage by 15% (down from 20%).

Deadly Throw no longer has a minimum range.

Garrote now ticks every 2 seconds (up from every 3 seconds). Damage has been adjusted to compensate.

Hemorrhage’s periodic damage is now based on attack power (instead of the initial strike's damage), and ticks every 2 seconds. Damage has been adjusted to compensate. has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

Sinister Calling now increases Agility by 15% (down from 30%), and the amount of Multistrike bonus received from all sources by 5% (in order to act as Subtlety’s Secondary Stat Attunement). And finally, when the rogue Multistrikes with Backstab or Ambush, they also twist the blade, causing all Bleed effects to advance by 2 seconds, triggering an instant tick instantly tick an additional time.

Ancestral Vigor has been removed.

Chain Heal now heals each chain target for 10% 15% less than the previous target.

Seed of Corruption and Soulburn: Seed of Corruption can no longer both apply to the same target.

One important difference between this and previous incarnations of Warrior stances is that these abilities are rotational, not utility cooldowns. Stances are now more for different gameplay modes (dealing damage vs. tanking). There shouldn’t be cases where you find yourself swapping stances, use an ability, and then immediately swapping back.

Colossus Smash now requires Battle Stance.

Recklessness now requires Battle Stance.

Sweeping Strikes now requires Battle Stance.

Devastate is now available to all Warrior specializations (was Protection only) and requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.

For Arms and Fury Warriors, Devastate has a 30% chance to reset the cooldown of Revenge.

Revenge is now available to all Warrior specializations (was Protection only), and requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.

Shield Barrier is now available for all Warrior specializations (was Protection only) and requires Defensive Stance.

For Arms and Fury Warriors, Shield Barrier can be used without a shield.

Taunt now requires Defensive Stance or Gladiator Stance.

Fury: Furious Strikes: Wild Strike costs 15 10 less Rage.

Bloodsurge’s effects have been merged into baseline Bloodthirst and no longer reduce Wild Strike’s global cooldown. Its spell alert has moved to the top slot instead of the left and right slots, and now has 2 charges (down from 3 charges).

Bloodthirst now replaces Heroic Strike for Fury Warriors.Wild Strike now has a 0.75 0.5 second baseline global cooldown, and costs 45 Rage.

Patch 5.4.8 Hotfixes for July 22

Blizzard

July 22

Creatures

Kurtok the Slayer's health has been reduced to be slightly less menacing to the denizens of Northshire.

The latest set of Warlords of Draenor Patch Notes has appeared!

As ever, here's our summary of the changes broken down class by class. Many classes have no specified changes in these notes, remember these do not necessarily tie in with the current build and datamining thereof.

Thick Hide has been removed and its effects have been incorporated into Bear Form for Guardian Druids

Bear Form now increases armor by 600% 330% for all Druid specializations, and no longer increases Haste and Critical Strike from items by 50%, but instead causes Haste to reduce the global cooldown

For Guardian Druids, Bear Form now also reduces magical damage taken by 25%, reduces physical damage taken by 12%, reduces chance to be critically hit by 6%, and reduces chance for attacks to be parried by 3%.

Tiger’s Fury is now usable during Berserk.

The damage of damage-over-time effects changes dynamically as Eclipse changes.

Moonfire now has a base duration of 20 seconds (up from 14 seconds), but is no longer extended by Starfire and Starsurge critical strikes. Upon reaching 100 Lunar Energy, the next Moonfire deals 100% additional initial damage.

Sunfire now has a base duration of 24 20 seconds (up from 14 seconds), but is no longer extended by Wrath and Starsurge critical strikes.

Omen of Clarity (Restoration) can now only be triggered by the most recently applied Lifebloom, and now causes the next Regrowth to be free.

Conversion no longer has an initial tick, and now costs 15 Runic Power/second for Blood, 10 20 Runic Power/second for Frost, and 20 10 Runic Power/second for Unholy.

Aspect of the Fox is a new ability for all Hunters.Aspect of the Fox: Party and raid members within 40 yards take on the aspects of a fox, allowing them to move while casting all spells for 6 seconds. Only one Aspect can be active at a time. 3 minute cooldown.

Ice Ward was changed to make it more competitive with the rest of its talent row.Ice Ward now causes the next 3 attackers (up from 1) to trigger a Frost Nova.

Mirror Image is now a level-90 Talent, replacing Invocation. Mirror Images now inherit 100% 50% of the Mage’s Spell Power (up from 5%), last 40 seconds (up from 30 seconds), and have a 2 minutes cooldown (down from 3 minutes).

No Changes listed

Selfless Healer no longer causes Bastion of Glory to apply to Flash Heal.

Holy Wrath’s damage and cooldown were increased, and Sanctified Wrath changed to buff it further, in order to give Protection Paladins more burst threat and damage, while retaining its core damage-splitting identity.

Holy Wrath’s damage has been increased by 100%, and its cooldown increased to 15 seconds (up from 9 seconds).

Sanctified Wrath for Protection Paladins has been redesigned.Sanctified Wrath (Protection) now increases the damage of Holy Wrath by 100% and causes it to generate 1 Holy Power.

No Changes listed

No Changes listed

No Changes listed

We were unsatisfied with Grimoire of Sacrifice for Demonology. Fundamentally, it did not fit Demonology’s theme to sacrifice their pet, full time. We had toyed with ideas where it acted as a temporary cooldown for Demonology, but have decided to replace it with a new talent, which is more theme-appropriate, and fits well against the competition in that talent row.

Grimoire of Sacrifice is no longer available to Demonology Warlocks and has a new talent, Grimoire of Synergy in its place.

Grimoire of Synergy: When the Warlock or their demon deals damage, there is a chance to trigger Demonic Synergy, granting the other one 15% increased damage for 15 seconds.

Thunder Clap now costs 15 30 Rage, and also reduces the movement speed of nearby enemies by 50% for 6 sec.

In order to make sure that you’re able to spend all of your resources within each Colossus Smash window, we added an extension to it onto Raging Blow.

Raging Blow now extends the duration of Colossus Smash by 2 seconds, and has a spell alert on the left and right slots.

The Human Spirit now increases Versatility, scaling with character level.

Line removed: To tie those together, Blood's Mastery is being changed to affect both the size of the Blood Shield absorb, and the new Rune Shield absorb.

Rune Tap has been redesigned. It now reduces all damage taken by 50% for 3 seconds. It also now has 2 charges, with a 40-second recharge time.

Will of the Necropolis has been redesigned. It now automatically triggers an immediate, free Rune Tap when you take damage that reduces you below 30% health. This effect cannot occur more often than once every 45 seconds.

Conversion was changed to cost different amounts by specialization, instead of reducing Runic Power generation differently by specialization. This way, Runic Power beyond what you spend on Conversion is not penalized.

Conversion no longer has an initial tick, and now costs 15 Runic Power/second for Blood, 20 Runic Power/sec for Frost, and 10 Runic Power/second for Unholy.

Survivalist increases the Hunter's chance to Multistrike by 10%.

Chimera Shot has been renamed Chimaera Shot. It is now a two-headed shot that hits two targets, and deals Frost or Nature damage. It no longer heals the Hunter.

Ignite now deals the same total damage with a 1 second period (down from 2 seconds). Base duration changed to 5 seconds so that duration when refreshed remains 6 seconds.